"

"But you forget, I'm not alone. I must consult my wife."

"That is what I don't wish you to do."

"Don't? You mean, go away with you without--?"

"I mean, without Mrs. Armine."

"Leave my wife?"

"Leave Ruby? Desert her after all she's done for me?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

Isaacson said nothing.

Nigel looked at Isaacson in silence for what seemed to Isaacson a long
time--minutes. Then his face slowly flushed, was suffused with blood up
to his forehead. It seemed to swell, as if there was a pressure from
within outwards. Then the blood retreated, leaving behind it a sort of
dark pallor, and the eyes looked sunken in their sockets.

"You--you dare to think--you dare to--to say--?" he stammered.

"I say that you must come away from Mrs. Armine. Don't ask me to say
why."

"You--you liar! You damnable liar!"

He spoke slowly, in a low, husky voice.

"That you hated her, I knew that! She told me that. But that you--that
you should dare to--"

His voice broke, and he stopped. He leaned forward in his chair and made
a gesture.

"Go!" he said. "Get out! If I--if I were myself, I'd put you out."

But Isaacson did not move. He felt no anger, nothing but a supreme pity
for this man who could not see, could not understand the truth of a
nature with which he had held commune for so long, and, as he in his
blindness believed, in such a perfect intimacy. There was to the Doctor
something shocking in such blindness, in such ignorance. But there was
something beautiful, too. And to destroy beauty is terrible.

"If I am to go, you must hear me first," he said, quietly.

"I won't hear you--not one word!"

Again there was the gesture towards the door.

"I have saved your life," Isaacson said. "And you shall hear me!"

And then, without waiting for Nigel to speak again, very quietly, very
steadily, and with a great simplicity he told him what he had to tell.
He did not, even now, tell him all. He kept secret the visit of Mrs.
Chepstow to his consulting-room, and her self-revelation there. And he
did not mention Baroudi. At this moment of crisis the man bred up in
England fought against the Eastern Jew within Isaacson, and the Eastern
Jew gave way. But he described his visits to the Savoy, how the last
time he had gone with the resolution to beg Mrs. Chepstow not to go to
Egypt, not to link herself with his friend; how he had begun to speak,
and how her cold irony, pitiless and serene, had shown him the utter
futil