"Get him away! Where to?"
"You've still got your villa at Luxor, I believe?"
"Oh, yes."
"I suppose it is comfortable, well arranged?"
"Pretty well."
"And it's quiet and has a garden, I know."
"You've seen it?"
"Yes. My boat was tied up just opposite to it the night before I started up river."
"Oh!"
"Perhaps you'll be kind enough to give the order to the Reis to start for Luxor as soon as possible?"
"Very well," she said, indifferently.
Her whole look and manner now were curiously indolent and indifferent. Before she had been full of fiercely nervous life. To-day it seemed as if that life was withdrawn from her.
"I'll tell him now," she said.
And without any more questions she went away to the deck.
Soon afterwards there was a stir. Cries were heard from the sailors, and the Loulia began to move, floating northwards with the tide. When Nigel asked the reason, Isaacson said to him: "This place is too isolated for an invalid. One can get at nothing here. You will be much more at your ease in your own home, and I can take better care of you there."
"We are going back to the villa?"
"Yes."
"I'm glad," Nigel said, slowly. "I never told her, but I was beginning to hate this boat; all this trouble has come upon me here. Sometimes--sometimes I have felt almost as if--"
He broke off.
"Yes?" Isaacson said, quietly.
"As if there were something that was fatal to me on board the Loulia."
"In the villa I shall get you back to your original health and strength."
The thin, lead-coloured face drooped forward, and the eyes that were full of a horrible malaise held for a moment the fires of hope.
"Do you really think I can ever get well?"
Isaacson did not reply for a moment. Then he said, "Will you make me a promise?"
"What is it?"
"Will you promise me to obey implicitly everything I order you to do?"
"Do you mean--as a doctor?"
"I do."
"I promise."
"Very well. If you carry out that promise, I think I can undertake to cure you. I think I can undertake that some day you will be once more the strong man who rejoices in his strength."
Tears came into Nigel's eyes.
"I wonder," he said. "I wonder."
"But remember," Isaacson said, almost with solemnity, "I shall expect from you implicit obedience to my medical orders. And the first of them is this: you are to swallow nothing which is not given to you by me with my own hand."
"Medicine, you mean?"
"I mean what I say--nothing; not a morsel of food, not a drop of liquid."