Suddenly he remembered what the General had said in that delirious moment when with bitter taunts he had told him to fly to some foreign country where men would know nothing of his disgrace. Cruel and unjust as that sentence had seemed to him then, it appeared to be all that was left to him now, when work and home and love alike were gone from him. "Yes, I’ll go away," he thought, with a choking sob. "I’ll bury myself as far from humanity as possible." Yet at the next moment the hand of iron was on his heart again, and he told himself that though he might fly from the sight of man he could not escape from the eye of God, and to be alone with that was more than a guilty man could bear, and live. "But why can’t I go to America?" he asked himself. It was his mother’s home, and a country to which something in his blood had always been calling him. But no! That refuge also was denied to him, for though he might hide in New York, or Boston, or Philadelphia, or Chicago, or San Francisco, better than in the trackless desert itself, yet in the very pulse of life he would still be alone, with a mind that must always be rambling through the ways of the past, seeing nothing in the happiness of other men but cruel visions of what might have come to him also but for one blind moment of headstrong passion. "Is life, then, to be utterly closed to me?" he thought. Was he neither to die for his crime nor live for his repentance? Had God Almighty set His face against both? He thought of Helena as she would be in England, alone like himself, cut off for the rest of her life from every happiness except the bitter one of her memory of their few short days together, thinking ill of him, as she needs must for leaving her in her sore need, while all the time his heart was yearning for love of her and he would have given his soul to be by her side, but for the barrier of blood which now seemed to separate them forever. And then in the bitterness of his remorse and the depths of his abased penitence, thinking the Almighty Himself must be against him, he began to pray—never having prayed since the days when his mother held him to her knee. "O God, have pity upon me," he cried, as he sat huddled up on his bed. "I only intended to do what was right, yet I have plunged everybody I love into trouble. What can I do? Where can I go? Let it be anything and anywhere! O Lord, speak to me, lead me, deliver me, tell me what I ought to do; tell me, tell me!" The green-shaded lamp on the table had gone out by this time, the darkness of the night had gone, and a dim gleam of saffron-tinted light from the dawn had begun to filter through the yellow window curtains of the room. Then suddenly the silence of the little, pulseless place was broken by the sound of eager footsteps running over the gravel path of the courtyard and leaping up the stone staircase of the house. It was Hafiz returning from the cemetery. *CHAPTER IX*