It was now November, 1882. Naturally he was coldly received at home, but his reception was somewhat mollified by a letter which the King of the Belgians sent him, for the second time asking him to enter his service. “For the moment,” says his Majesty, “I have no mission to offer you, but I wish to have you at my disposal, and I wish to take you from this moment as my counsellor. You can name your own terms. You know the consideration I have for your great qualities.” The post that he would probably have had was the Governorship of the Congo. One can imagine how in such a position he would have dealt with an unhung blackguard like Lothaire, the murderer of a man who had confided himself to his hospitality. He spent most of the following year in travel, chiefly in Palestine. The Delta of Egypt had been conquered, Mohammed Achmet, the carpenter’s son, had become Mahdi, and the Soudan revolt was in full blast. Now at last the British Government called upon the one man who, had his genius and his work been recognised ten years sooner, could have saved so much disgrace and disaster. How utterly he had been neglected and how completely he was unknown in his own country even now, may be guessed from a remark made by a gentleman to an officer of the Pembroke garrison. “I see,” said this person, “that the Government have just sent a Chinaman to the Soudan. What can they mean by sending a native of that country to such a place?” He thought, alas, that “Chinese Gordon” was a yellow-faced Asiatic who wore a pigtail--and yet, after all, did British Officialdom know very much more about the hero it was now sending to his death? In Egypt all was panic. The army of Hicks Pasha had been annihilated. All Gordon’s work was undone, and the Mahdi was practically master of the Soudan. But meanwhile Gordon had decided to accept the King of the Belgians’ offer. On New Year’s Day, 1884, he reached Brussels to tell him so, and the same day he learnt that the British Government would not let him go. His thoroughly justified answer was a request to be allowed to retire from Her Majesty’s service, “without any claim whatever for pension”--King Leopold, with a juster estimate of the man’s value, having promised to make up the loss to him. The refusal was withdrawn, and he prepared to start for the Congo. Then on the 17th of January there came that memorable telegram from Lord Wolseley asking him to come to London. He knew what he was wanted for and he went. The work was the pacification and then the evacuation of the Soudan. By the 18th of February he was in Khartoum again. His old influence at once reasserted itself. What followed is too recent and too well known for detailed repetition here: the vacillation between war and peace, between diplomacy and force, argument when there should have been hard-hitting, and hard-hitting when there should have been argument. [Illustration: THE LONELY MAN WHO STOOD ON THE RAMPARTS OF KHARTOUM.]