"I’ll want a good deal, Hafiz. There’s a bundle of bank notes in the top drawer of my desk at the barracks. You’ll find the key in my trousers’ pocket, and if you can only contrive——" "Of course I can. Your soldier boy has been asking after you ever since you went away. He’ll manage it. Macdonald’s bloodhounds are beating about the barracks, of course, but Tommy—trust Tommy to get the money for you.... In your trousers’ pocket, you say? ... All right. Here’s the key! ... Let me see, now—you’ll want your berth booked—to Messina, I mean. I’ll do that myself and give you whatever’s left ... I must keep out of people’s way until after Wednesday, though! No calling at the Agency—not if I know it! My mother must be told I’ve been sent off somewhere, and as for the Consul-General and the telephone—I’ll break the blessed receiver, that’s what I’ll do! ... Never mind about my not seeing you off. Lord alive, that’s nothing! Hope to get leave before long, and then I’ll slip over to England. So I’ll not be saying good-bye to you when you go away, Gordon—not altogether, you know—not for good, I mean. And if all goes well with you and Helena——" But the chuckling and the crowing and the laughing out loud in savage exultation at the thought of beating Macdonald were beginning to break down, and then Gordon, unable to keep back the truth any longer, said in a voice that chilled the ear of Hafiz— "Hafiz, old fellow!" "Well?" "I don’t intend to go back to England." "You don’t intend to go back——" "No." "Then where the ... where are you going to, Charlie?" "I’m going to Khartoum." *CHAPTER XI* During the earlier hours of the Night of Lamentation Helena sat in her room looking over bundles of old letters and tying them up with ribbon. The letters were nearly all from Gordon, but being written under different conditions and meant to be read in happier hours, every playful passage in them stung and every word of affection scorched. She was waiting for the black boy to come back from the demonstration, and thinking out a course of conduct. Instead of returning to England she was to remain in Cairo, and by help of the new evidence she was to compel the law to arrest and convict the guilty man. It was her right to do so, and since the authorities, thinking of other things, were shirking their responsibility, it was her duty, her solemn and sacred duty. What did State considerations matter to her? Nothing! She remembered the predicament of the Army surgeon without compunction, and even when she thought of the position of the Consul-General she did not care. Her father was dead, Gordon was lost to her, she was a woman and she was alone, and nothing else was of the smallest consequence. Thus seeing to the bottom of her own misery, she had now no pity for anybody else.