ionless. And now, with her thought of the
truth revealed to her husband was linked another thought of the girl
with Baroudi on board of the _Loulia_.

"Then I told him to go, or I would put him out."

"Ah!" she said.

There was a sort of bitter astonishment in the exclamation, and now in
the eyes regarding him Nigel seemed to discern wonder.

"And he went, after he had told me some--some other things."

Something in her, in her face, or her manner, or her deadly silence,
broken only by that seemingly almost sarcastic cry--began evidently to
affect her husband.

"Some other things," he repeated.

"What were they?"

"He said he had come out from England because he had suspected something
was wrong. He told me that he met you by chance in the temple of Edfou,
that you seemed terrified at seeing him, that it was not you who asked
him to come to the _Loulia_ to see me, but that, on the contrary, he
asked to come and you refused to let him. He said you even sent him a
letter telling him not to come. He gave me that letter. Here it is. I
have not read it."

He put his hand into his coat and drew out the letter, and with it the
gilded box which Baroudi had given to her in the orange garden.

"There is the letter."

He laid it on the table.

"I found this in your room when I went for the cloak," he said, "full of
Eastern things for the face."

His eyes were a question.

"I bought it in Cairo yesterday."

He laid it down.

"In spite of that letter--Isaacson said--he did come that night, and he
overheard us talking on the balcony, and heard me say how I wished he
were in Egypt."

He stopped again. His own narrative seemed to be waking up something in
his mind.

"Why didn't you tell me then that you knew he was in Egypt?" he asked.

She merely raised her eyebrows. Within her now the recklessness was
increasing. With it was blent a strange and powerful sensation of
fatalism.

"Was it because you hated Isaacson so much?"

"That was it."

"But then--but then, when he was with me, you said that you had brought
him. You said that in the temple you had begged him to come. I remember
that quite well."

"Do you?" she said.

And fate seemed to her to be moving her lips, to be forming for her each
word she said.

"Yes. Why was that? Why did you say that?"

"Don't remember!"

"You don't--?"

He got up slowly out of his chair.

"But the--the strangest thing Isaacson said was this."

He put one hand o