So perhaps had Downing envisaged her during those first days when he had been drawn out of his austere, watchful self by a charm Circe-like and compelling, when Mrs. Robinson had been engaged in the great feminine game at which she was so skilful a player--that of subduing a heart believed to be impregnable. But her opponent himself had only caught fire, in any deep unchanging sense, when his Circe had suddenly revealed another and a very different side to her nature. Just as an apparently trivial incident will often deflect the whole course of a human career, so, in the more complex and subtle life of the heart, a physical accident may quicken feeling into life, or destroy the nascent emotion. Downing had not been long at Pol les Thermes when he fell ill from a return of the fever which often attacks Europeans in Persia, and Mrs. Robinson, after two long, dull days, during which she had been bereft of the stimulating presence of her new friend--or prey--took on herself the office, not so much of nurse as of secretary, to the lonely man. It was then, when her mere presence had seemed to lift him out of a pit of deep physical depression, that Downing had found her to be a far more enduringly attractive woman than the brilliant, seductive figure who had appeared before him as a ripe delicious fruit, with which he had known well enough he must never slake his thirst. Her he could have left, and gone on his way, sighing that such Hesperidean apples were not for him. It was the softer, and, it must be said, the more intelligent and companionable, woman who received, during those days when she was simply kind, confidences concerning his present ambitions, and his schemes for benefiting the country with which he had now so many links, as well as that which had given him birth, and which was about to welcome him back, him the prodigal, with high honour. Mrs. Robinson would have been surprised indeed had she known how much more it cost this friend she longed to turn into a lover to tell her of the present fame than of the far-away disgrace. When he revealed to her something of his hopes, of his plans, of what he intended to do when in England, it meant that she had conquered a side of Downing's nature which had been wholly starved since the great trouble which had ruined his youth--that which longed for human intimacy and confidence.