Mrs. Armine had been dominated for the moment. She had obeyed. She had done the thing she hated to do. But she was not the woman to run straight on any path that led away from her wishes; she now loathed as well as feared Meyer Isaacson, and she had a cruelly complete influence over her husband. And even any secret fear could not hold her animus against the man who understood her wholly in check. Like the mole, she must work in the dark. She could not help it.

What she had said of him to Nigel, between his first and his second visits to the Loulia, Isaacson did not know. Indeed, he scarcely cared to know. It was not difficult to divine how she had used her influence. Isaacson could almost hear her reciting the catalogue of his misdeeds against herself, could almost see her eyes as she murmured the insinuations which doubtless the sick man had believed--because in his condition he must believe almost anything she persistently told him.

Yet at a word from her he had agreed to accept all the ministrations of his friend, which at another word he had been willing to repel.

The fact was that secretly he was crying out for the powerful hand to save him from the abyss. And he believed in Isaacson as a doctor, however much he now resented Isaacson's mistrust, no longer to be doubted, of the woman his chivalry had lifted to a throne.