"It mattered very much. But I don't think I really thought it."
"Yes, you did!" she said, sharply.
He sat straight up, like a man very much startled.
"You did think it. Don't try to get out of it, Nigel."
"Ruby, I'm not trying. Why, haven't I said--"
But she interrupted him.
"You did think, what every one thinks, that I'm a greedy, soulless woman, and that I even married you"--she laid a fierce emphasis on the pronoun--"out of the wretched, pettifogging ambition some day to be Lady Harwich. You did think it, Nigel. You did think it!"
"For one moment," he said.
He got up from the sofa, and stood by the window. He felt like a man in a moral crisis, and that what he said at this moment, and how he said it, with how much deep sincerity and how much warmth of heart, might, even must, determine the trend of the future.
"For one moment I did just wonder whether perhaps when you married me you had thought I might some day be Lord Harwich."
"Of course."
"Al-lah--"
Through the open window came faintly the nasal cry of the Nubian sailor beginning the song of the Nile upon the lower deck of the Loulia. With it there entered the very dim throbbing of the beaten daraboukkeh, sounding almost like some strange and perpetual ground-swell of the night, that flood of shadowy mystery and beauty in which they and the world were drowned. The distant music added to her sense of excitement and to his.
"Ruby--try to see--I think it was partly a humble feeling that made me wonder--a difficulty in believing you had cared very much for me."
"Why should you, or any one, think I have it in me to care?"
"I thought so in London, I think so here, I have always thought so--always. If others have--have disbelieved in you ever, I haven't been like them. You doubt it?"
He moved a step forward, and stood looking down on her.
"But I could prove it."
"Oh--how?"
"Meyer Isaacson knows it."
He did not refer to his marrying her as a proof already given, for that might have meant something else than belief in the hidden unworldliness of her, and in her hidden desire for that which was good and beautiful.
"And don't you--don't you know it, even after this morning?"
"After this morning--I don't want to hurt you--but after this morning you will have to prove it to me, thoroughly prove it, or else I shall not believe it."
The solo voice of the Nubian sailor was lost in the chorus of voices which came floating over the Nile.