pen, and got up.

He knew quite well what was troubling him. It was the letter he had had
from the Nile. At first it had disturbed him in one way. Now it was
disturbing him in another. It was a call to him from a land which he
knew he must love, a call to him from his own place. For his ancestors
had been Jews of the East, and some of them had been settled in Cairo.
It was a call from the shining land. He remembered how one night, when
Nigel and he were talking about Egypt, Nigel had said: "You ought to go
there. You'd be in your right place there."

If he did go there! If he went soon, very soon--this spring!

But how could he take a holiday in the spring, just when everybody was
coming to town? Then he told himself that he was saying nonsense to
himself. People went abroad in the spring, to India, Sicily, the
Riviera, the Nile. Ah, he was back again on the Nile! But so many people
did not go abroad. It would be madness for a fashionable doctor to be
away just when the season was coming on. Well, but he might run out for
a very short time--for a couple of weeks, something like that. Two
nights from London to Naples; two nights at sea in one of the new, swift
boats, the _Heliopolis_, perhaps; a few hours in the train, and he would
be at Cairo. Five nights' travelling would bring him to the first
cataract. And he would be in the real light.

He stared at the electric bulbs that gleamed on either side of the
mantelpiece. Then he glanced towards the windows, oblongs of dingy grey
looking upon fog and daylight darkness.

That would be good, to be in the real light!

Nigel's letter lay somewhere under the letters from patients. The Doctor
went back to his table, searched for it, and found it. Then he came back
to the fire, and studied the letter carefully again.

"Do you remember our walk home from the concert that night, and how I
said, 'I want to get into the light, the real light'? Well, I'm in it,
and how I wish that you and every one else could be in it too!... Come
to the Nile when next you take a holiday."

It was almost an invitation to go; not quite an invitation, but almost.
Isaacson seemed to divine that the man who wrote wished his friend to
come out and see his happiness, but that he did not quite dare to ask
him to come out; seemed to divine a hostile influence that kept the pen
in check.

"I wonder if she knows of this letter?"

That question came into Isaacson's mind. The last words of the letter