"What do you think the Consul-General meant when he said Helena frightened him?" "I think he meant that she’s one of the girls who do things when they’re in trouble—drown themselves, take poison, or something." "My poor Helena! My poor Gordon!" There was the rustling whisper of a prayer at the pillow, and then, for the weary and careworn old lady another day slid into night. *CHAPTER VIII* Meantime Gordon, with a heart filled with darkness, sat huddled up on his bed in the little guest-room of the Coptic Cathedral. On a table at his left a small green-shaded lamp was burning, and on a chair at his right sat the saintly old Patriarch, gently patting his bare arm and trying in vain to comfort him. "Yes, God is merciful, my son, and it is just because we are such guilty creatures that our Lord came to deliver us." "But you don’t know, Father, you don’t know," said Gordon. "Know—what, my son?" "You don’t know what reason I have to reproach myself," said Gordon, and then, catching by the sure instinct of a pure heart some vague sense of Gordon’s position, the old man began to talk of confession, wherein the soul of man lays down its sins before God and begins to feel as if it had wings. "On receiving the penitent’s confession," he said, "it is the duty of the Coptic priest to take his sin upon himself just as if it were his own, and if I, my son——" "But you can’t! It’s impossible! God forbid it," said Gordon; and then the saintly old soul, allowing that there were sacred places in the heart of man which only God’s eye should see, spoke of atonement, whereby he that is guilty of any sin may begin his journey towards repentance, and be numbered at last, if his penitence be true, among the living who live in God’s peace. "Why should any of us, my son, no matter how foul the stain of sin we have contracted, live in the dread of miscarrying for ever while we have energy to atone?" said the good old man in his worn and husky voice; and then the tides of Gordon’s troubled mind, which had ebbed and flowed like the sea on a desolate shore under the blank darkness of a starless night, seemed to be suddenly brightened by a light from the morning. "Father," he said, "could you send for somebody?" "Indeed I could—who is it?" asked the Patriarch. "Captain Hafiz Ahmed of the Egyptian Army. He can be found at headquarters. Say that some one he knows well wishes to see him at once." "I’ll tell Michael to take the message immediately," said the Patriarch, and his shuffling old feet went off on his errand.