This incident did not facilitate Sir H. Elliot’s task. On the day following the 5th October, Lord Derby instructs Sir H. Elliot to inform the Porte that it is intended that the armistice should be followed by a Conference, and that if an armistice for not less than a month is not granted, the Ambassador was to quit Constantinople and leave Turkey to its fate.[47] On the 8th October, the Porte asks the very pertinent question whether, in the event of the conditions being accepted, a Conference would still be proposed.[48] No answer seems ever to have been given to this important question. The Turkish Ministers now submitted the question of the armistice to a Grand Council, which acceded to it for five months.[49] On the 13th October, in a long telegram to Musurus Pasha, the Porte makes a last despairing attempt to stay the decision for a Conference, which it says “will at least give rise to the danger of certain impulses on which head we have the right to be anxious, and which in reality would be of no use. The five months’ armistice would leave ample time for the Powers to exchange explanations and observations without any Conference. During this time, the work of internal reform would go on, and Europe would have the opportunity of being edified as to the serious and practical character of the promises of the Imperial Government,” and concluded by saying, referring evidently to the negotiations with Sir H. Elliot, “I hope His Lordship will agree with us in preventing the question, _which was just beginning to look brighter_, thanks to so many sacrifices and efforts, from being turned into a path of new difficulties and perils.”[50] If it had not been for the Soumarakoff Mission, and the scare it created in the Foreign Office, it would have been an inexplicable mystery why Lord Derby, abandoning negotiations carried on by Sir H. Elliot, which “were just beginning to look brighter,” should have hurriedly fathered this proposal of a Conference. If the Soumarakoff Mission was only intended to secure this point, it was most eminently successful. Anyway, from this time forth, Lord Derby stuck grimly to a Conference. Without a Conference there was no salvation. The question, however, of the duration of the armistice was not yet settled, and as England, having accepted six months, could not recant, General Ignatieff arrived from Livadia to settle it.