“No, I don’t think you are grateful.  I don’t think you are the woman to be grateful without a cause.”

“Or with one,” he mentally added.

“But here is the cause!”

She touched his sleeve.  And suddenly, with that touch, all her charm for him vanished, and he was angry with her for daring to treat him like those boys by whom she had been surrounded, for daring to think that she could play upon the worst in him.

“I’m afraid you are mistaken,” he said.  “I am no cause for your gratitude.”

She looked more cordial and natural even than before.

“But I think you are.  For you don’t really like me, and yet you come to see me.  That is unselfishness.”

“Only supposing what you say were true, and that you did like me.”

“I do like you.”

She said it quite simply, without emphasis.  And even to him it sounded true.

“Some day perhaps you will know it.”

“But—­I do not believe it.”

He had recovered from the stroke of her greatest weapon, her voice.

“That does not matter.  What is matters, not what some one thinks is, or is not.”

“Yes,” he said.  “What is matters.  I have come here, not to pay a formal call, or even a friendly visit, but, perhaps, to commit an impertinence.”

She smilingly moved her head, and handed him her cigarette-case.

“No, you would never do that.”

He hesitated to take a cigarette—­and now her bright eyes frankly mocked him, and said, “A cigarette commits you to nothing!” Certainly she knew how to make him feel almost like an absurd and awkward boy; or was it his feeling of overwork, of physical depression, that was disarming him today?

“Thank you.”

He lighted a cigarette, and she lighted another, still with a happy air.

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“I feel it.”

With a little laugh, she reminded him of his saying about women.

“You are wrong.  I am going to do it,” he said.

“But—­do you really think it an impertinence?”

He was beset by his sensitive dislike to mix in other people’s affairs, but almost angrily he overcame it.

“I don’t know.  You may.  Mrs. Chepstow, you were raving just now about the delights of the English winter—­”

“Shut out!” she interpolated.

“Then why should you avoid them?”

“And who says I am going to?”

“Are not you going to Egypt?”

She settled herself in the angle of the sofa.

“Would it be the wrong climate for me, Doctor Isaacson?”

She put an emphasis on “Doctor.”

“I am not talking as a doctor.”

“Then as a friend—­or as an enemy?”

“As a friend—­of his.”

“Of whom?”

“Of Nigel Armine.”

“Because he is working in the Fayyum, may not I go up the Nile?”

“If you were on the Nile, Armine would not be in the Fayyum.”