"You dislike my having written to him?"
"I'm a fool, Nigel--that's the truth. I'm afraid of everything and everybody."
"Afraid! You're surely not afraid of Isaacson?"
"I tell you I'm afraid of everybody."
She stopped by the rail, and looked towards the west.
"To me happiness seems such a brittle thing that any one might break it. And men--forgive me!--men generally have such clumsy hands."
He leaned on the rail beside her, turning himself towards her.
"You don't mean to say that you think Isaacson could ever break our happiness, even if he wished to?"
"Why not?"
"Don't you understand me at all?"
There was in his voice a tremor of deep feeling.
"Do you think," he went on, "that a man who is worth anything at all would allow even his dearest friend to come between him and the woman whom he loved and who was his? Do you think that I would allow any one, woman or man, to come between me and you?"
"Are you sure you wouldn't?"
"What a tragedy it must be to be so distrustful of love as you are!" he said, almost with violence.
"You haven't lived my life."
She, too, spoke almost with violence, and there was violence in her eyes.
"You haven't lived for years in the midst of condemnation. Your friend, Doctor Isaacson, secretly condemns me. I know it. And so I'm afraid of him. I don't pretend to have any real reason--any reason that would commend itself to a man. Women don't need such reasons for their fears."
"And yet you say that you like Isaacson!"
"So I do, in a way. At least, I thought I did, till you told me you'd written to him to tell him about us and our life on the Nile."
He could not help smiling.
"Oh!" he said, moving nearer to her. "I shall never understand women. What a reason for dislike of a man hundreds of miles away from us!"
"Hundreds of miles--yes! And if your letter brought him to us! Suppose he took it into his head to run out and see for himself if what you wrote was true?"
"Ruby! How wild you are in your suppositions!"
"They're not so wild as you think. Doctor Isaacson is just the man to do such a thing."
"Well, even if he did--?"
"Do you want him to?" she interrupted.
He hesitated.
"You do want him to."
She said it bitterly.
"And I thought I was enough!" she exclaimed.
"It isn't that, Ruby--it isn't that at all. But I confess that I should like Isaacson to see for himself how happy we are together."