When the short service was over and the Consul-General drew her hand through his arm again, and they walked together over the gravel and through the grass to the open grave behind the rose-bushes that grew near to the wall, she thought she knew she had only to raise her eyes from the ground and she would see Gordon standing there, shaken with sobs. She knew, too, that the moment she saw him she would break down altogether, so she kept her head low as long as she could. But when the troops had formed in a rectangle, and the Chaplain had taken his place and the last words had been spoken, and through a deeper hush the bugle had led the voices of the soldiers with— "Father, in Thy gracious keeping Leave we now Thy servant sleeping," and she looked up at last and saw that Gordon had not come at all, she felt as if something that had been soft and tender within her had broken, and something that was hard and bitter had taken its place. While the volleys were being fired over the grave the officers of the army came up to her one by one—brave men all of them, but many of them hardly able at that moment to speak or see. Still she did not weep, and when the Consul-General, with twitching lips, said, "Let us go," she gave him her hand again, though it was limp and nerveless now, and, under her long black glove, as cold as snow. The blinds were drawn up in her room when she returned to the Citadel, and with eyes that did not see she was staring out on its far view of the city, the Nile, the Pyramids, and the rolling waves of desert beyond, when a knock came to the door and the Consul-General entered. He was clearly much affected. His firm mouth, which often looked as if it had been cast in bronze, seemed now to be blown in foam. "Helena," he said, "the time has come to speak plainly. I am sorry. It is quite unavoidable." After the first salutation she continued to stand by a chair and to stare out of the window. "Gordon has gone. I can no longer have any doubt about that. Others, with other motives, have been trying to find him and have failed. I have been trying, too, with better purposes perhaps, but no better results." His voice was hoarse; he was struggling to control it. "I am now satisfied that when he left this house after the scene ... the painful, perhaps unsoldierly, scene of his ... his degradation, he took the advice your father gave him—to fly from Egypt and hide his shame in some other country." He paused for a moment and then said— "It was scarcely proper advice, perhaps; but who can be hot and cold, wise and angry, in a moment? Whatever the merits of your father’s counsel, I think Gordon made up his mind to follow it. Only as the conduct of a despairing man who knew that all was over can I explain his last appearance at El Azhar." Again he paused for a moment, and then, after clearing his throat, he said—