“It all seems natural enough,” rejoined David.
“Isn’t it all inevitable law? I have no belief in ‘antic Fate.’”
Hylda realised, with a new and poignant understanding, the difference of outlook on life between the two men. She suddenly remembered the words of Confucius, which she had set down in her little book of daily life: “By nature we approximate, it is only experience that drives us apart.”
David would have been content to live in the desert all his life for the sake of a cause, making no calculations as to reward. Eglington must ever have the counters for the game.
“Well, if you do not believe in ‘antic Fate,’ you must be greatly puzzled as you go on,” he rejoined, laughing; “especially in Egypt, where the East and the West collide, race against race, religion against religion, Oriental mind against Occidental intellect. You have an unusual quantity of Quaker composure, to see in it all ‘inevitable law.’ And it must be dull. But you always were, so they say in Hamley, a monument of seriousness.”
“I believe they made one or two exceptions,” answered David drily. “I had assurances.”
Eglington laughed boyishly. “You are right. You achieved a name for humour in a day--‘a glass, a kick, and a kiss,’ it was. Do you have such days in Egypt?”
“You must come and see,” David answered lightly, declining to notice the insolence. “These are critical days there. The problems are worthy of your care. Will you not come?”
Eglington was conscious of a peculiar persuasive influence over himself that he had never felt before. In proportion, however, as he felt its compelling quality, there came a jealousy of the man who was its cause. The old antagonism, which had had its sharpest expression the last time they had met on the platform at Heddington, came back. It was one strong will resenting another--as though there was not room enough in the wide world of being for these two atoms of life, sparks from the ceaseless wheel, one making a little brighter flash than the other for the moment, and then presently darkness, and the whirring wheel which threw them off, throwing off millions of others again.
On the moment Eglington had a temptation to say something with an edge, which would show David that his success in Egypt hung upon the course that he himself and the weak Foreign Minister, under whom he served, would take. And this course would be his own course largely, since he had been appointed to be a force and strength in the Foreign Office which his chief did not supply. He refrained, however, and, on the moment, remembered the promise he had given to Faith to help David.