"Some day perhaps you will know it."
"But--I do not believe it."
He had recovered from the stroke of her greatest weapon, her voice.
"That does not matter. What is matters, not what some one thinks is, or is not."
"Yes," he said. "What is matters. I have come here, not to pay a formal call, or even a friendly visit, but, perhaps, to commit an impertinence."
She smilingly moved her head, and handed him her cigarette-case.
"No, you would never do that."
He hesitated to take a cigarette--and now her bright eyes frankly mocked him, and said, "A cigarette commits you to nothing!" Certainly she knew how to make him feel almost like an absurd and awkward boy; or was it his feeling of overwork, of physical depression, that was disarming him today?
"Thank you."
He lighted a cigarette, and she lighted another, still with a happy air.
"How do you know that?" he asked.
"I feel it."
With a little laugh, she reminded him of his saying about women.
"You are wrong. I am going to do it," he said.
"But--do you really think it an impertinence?"
He was beset by his sensitive dislike to mix in other people's affairs, but almost angrily he overcame it.
"I don't know. You may. Mrs. Chepstow, you were raving just now about the delights of the English winter--"
"Shut out!" she interpolated.
"Then why should you avoid them?"
"And who says I am going to?"
"Are not you going to Egypt?"
She settled herself in the angle of the sofa.
"Would it be the wrong climate for me, Doctor Isaacson?"
She put an emphasis on "Doctor."
"I am not talking as a doctor."
"Then as a friend--or as an enemy?"
"As a friend--of his."
"Of whom?"
"Of Nigel Armine."
"Because he is working in the Fayyum, may not I go up the Nile?"
"If you were on the Nile, Armine would not be in the Fayyum."
"You are anxious about his reclaiming of the desert? Have you put money into his land scheme?"
"You think I only care for money?" he said, nettled, despite himself, at the sound of knowledge in her voice.
"What do you know of me?"
"And you--of me?"
She still spoke lightly, smilingly. But he thought of the inexorable beating of that pulse of life--of life, and the will to live as her philosophy desired.
"I don't wish to speak of any knowledge I may have of you. But--leave Armine in the Fayyum."
"Did he say I was going to Egypt?"
"He spoke of it once only. Then he said you might go."
"Anything else?"
"He said that if you did go he would look after you."