What of his conscience, which had clamoured so loudly, in relation to his own conduct? Could he continue to plead extenuation of his own offence on the ground of the General’s unjustifiable and unsoldierly conduct? or to tell himself that what he had done in the General’s house had been in self-defence? Had it been in self-defence that he had returned to the Citadel after he was ordered to his own quarters? or that he had hurled hot and insulting words at the General, such as no man could listen to without loss of pride or even self-respect? "No, no; my God, no!" he thought. And then Helena? With what conscience could he comfort her in her sufferings, being himself the cause of them? With what sincerity could his tongue speak if his pen refused to write? And if he juggled himself into deceiving her, could he go on, as his affections would tempt him to do—now more than ever since her father was gone and she was quite alone—to carry out the plans he had made for them before these fearful events befell? "Impossible! utterly impossible!" he told himself. A grim vision rose before him of a shameful life, corrupted by hypocrisy and damned by deceit, in which he was married to Helena, having succeeded to her father’s rank and occupying his house, his room, his office, with one sight standing before his eyes always—the sight of the General’s body lying on the floor where he had flung it. "O God, save me from that!" he thought. Gordon dropped back to the bed and sat on the edge of it, doubled up and with his hands covering his face. How long he sat there he never knew, for his mind was deadened to all sense of time, and only at intervals of lucidity was he partly conscious of what was going on outside the little pulseless place in which he was hidden away while the world went on without him. At one moment he heard the bells of the Coptic Cathedral ringing for evensong; then the light pattering as of rain when the people passed over the pavement into the church; and then suddenly there came a sound that seemed to beat on his very soul.