e answered Nigel's letter, he would not yield to his impulse. And if
he did not answer it--?

After long hesitation, he put the letter aside, he got out of a drawer
his pile of manuscript paper, and he set himself to work. And presently
he forgot that it was Sunday in London; he forgot everything except what
he was doing. But in the evening, when he was dining alone, the longing
to be off returned, and though he said to himself that he would not
yield to it, he did not answer Nigel's letter. Absurdly, he felt that by
not answering it he left the door open to this possible pleasure.

He never answered that letter. Day after day went by. He worked with
unflagging energy. He seemed as attentive to, as deeply interested in,
his patients as usual. But all the time that he sat in his
consulting-room, that he listened to accounts of symptoms, that he gave
advice and wrote out prescriptions, he was secretly playing with the
idea that perhaps this spring he would take a holiday in Egypt. He had
an ardent, though generally carefully controlled imagination. Just now
he gave it the reins. In the darkest days he saw himself in sunlight.
When he looked at the bare trees in the parks, they changed in a moment
to opulent palms. He heard a soft wind stirring their mighty leaves. It
spoke to him of the desert. Never before had he gained such definite
pleasure from his imagination. Had he become a child again? It almost
seemed so. If his patients only knew the present truths of the man whom
they begged to lead them to health! If they only knew his wanderings
while they were unfolding their tales of wonder and woe! But his face
told nothing. It did not cry to them, "I am in Egypt!" And so they were
never perturbed.

February slipped away.

If he really meant to go to the Nile, he must not delay his departure.
Did he mean to go? So long now had he played with the delightful
imagination of a voyage to the sun that he began to say to himself that
he had had his pleasure and must rest satisfied. He even told himself
the commonplace lie that the thought of a thing is more satisfactory
than the thing itself could ever be, and that to him the real Egypt
would prove a disappointment after the imagined Egypt of his winter
dreams. And he decided that he would not go, that he had never intended
to go.

On the day when he took this decision, he got a letter from a patient
whom he had sent to winter on the Nile. She wrote from Luxor many
details