"Let me give you a candle," said Toby; and they left the room.
Then said Kit very softly, as if to herself: "Poor Toby! poor dear Toby."
Mrs. Murchison heard (she was meant to hear). Hence, on the following afternoon she wished for a private conversation with Toby, and at this moment they were in the punt together. Mrs. Murchison was, considered as a conversationalist, a little liable to be discursive, and heat and a heavy lunch combined to emphasize this tendency; they melted her brains, and a perfect stream of information concerning all parts of the globe came rioting out. Besides this natural bent, she considered it best to approach the subject, on which she particularly wanted to talk to Toby, by imperceptible degrees, not run at him with it as if she was a charging Dervish fighting for Allah. This accounts for her saying that the Thames reminded her so much of the Nile.
Now, Toby, like many others, snatched a fearful joy from Mrs. Murchison's conversation. He saw that the flood-gates were opening, and, with a sigh of delighted anticipation, he said that he supposed it was very like indeed.
"Quite remarkably like, quite," said Mrs. Murchison, "and the closer you look, the more the simile grows upon you. Dear me, how I enjoyed that winter we spent in Egypt! How often I thought over the psalm, 'When Israel came out of Egypt'! We spent a fortnight in Cairo first, and what between the dances and the bazaars and the tombs of the Marmadukes, and the excursions, we had plenty to do. I remember so well one ride to the Pyramids of Sahara, where we met a very famous archeologist whose name I forget, but he had red whiskers and a very nervous manner, and showed us over them."
"That must have been very pleasant," said Toby.
"Most delicious. Then another day we went to see the tree under which the Virgin Mary sat when she went to Egypt, which was really a remarkable coincidence, because my name is Mary, too, and the guide gave us a leaf from it as a Memento Mary. Ah, dear me, how charming and quaint it all was! Then we went up the river in our own private diabetes and stuck on a sandbank for weeks."
Toby's breath caught in his throat for a moment, but he stiffened his risible muscle like a man.
"Didn't you find that rather tedious?" he asked.