"Oh, Lord Ernest, you don't think he will, after he's sworn that I'm the only woman in the world he could ever have loved? He thinks me much better looking than Monny. He says she hasn't got a soul, yet. He doubts if she ever will have one."
I didn't doubt it. I thought I had heard it stirring in the throes of birth, a soul such as would blind the eyes of a Rachel Guest, with its white shining. Monny had said that she would "find her soul in Egypt." But the mention of this was not indicated just then.
"I haven't the courage to tell him, even if there were really anything definite enough to tell," Rachel went on. "It would be insulting a man like Willis to suggest that he'd been influenced—you know what I mean. But—now we're talking of it—oh, do advise me! We're planning to be married in Egypt, at the end of this trip, and then settle down in Cairo, for Mr. Bailey's studies at the museum. He came up the Nile only for me, you see! And he says I shall be his first model for the new style—my eyes are just right, as if they'd been made on purpose to help him. I lie awake nights wondering what if, before the wedding, when he finds out for certain that my name is really only Rachel Guest, and that I'm I—oh, I daren't think of it!"
"Then, if you want me to advise, why don't you in some tactful, perhaps joking way, speak of the story Bedr started, and—"
"I can't—I simply can't."
"Yet you feel it would be better?"
"Yes—sometimes I feel it. You help me, Lord Ernest. You tell him. And then, if you see any signs—you'll make him understand how dreadful it would be to throw me over because I'm poor and have been a nobody till now?"
"I'll do my best," I heard myself weakly promising.
No wonder I have earned the nickname of Duffer!