At midnight the black boy had not returned, and being worn out with sleeplessness, and assured by her other servants that Mosie was well able to take care of himself, she went to bed. But the moonlight filtered through the white window-blind, and she lay for some time with wide-open eyes thinking what she would do next day. She would go down to the Ministry of the Interior and set the law in motion. There would be no time to lose, for if Ishmael escaped the consequences of to-night’s proceedings he might leave Cairo without delay. She slept a few hours only, and when she awoke the sun was flecking with fiery bars a window that faced to the east. While she lay on her back with her arm under her head, looking at the ceiling, and working herself up into a still greater hatred of Ishmael, there came a timid knock at the door and the black boy entered the room. He was breathless and dishevelled and full of apologies. "Lady angry with Mosie? Mosie stop all night to tell lady everything," he said, and then he told her what had happened in the Mohammedan cemetery—a wild, disordered, delirious story of the departure of the hundred men. "But the prophet himself—what has become of him?" asked Helena, raising her head from her pillow. "White Prophet gone," said Mosie. "Gone?" "Mosie follow him to station. White Prophet go by train, lady." "By train?" "Yes, lady. White Prophet go by train to Upper Egypt," said Mosie, and then Helena heard no more. Her head fell back to her pillow and she covered her eyes with her hands. The guilty man was gone, the authorities had allowed him to go, and if the evil-doer was to be punished there was nothing left but personal vengeance. Every tender impulse of her heart was now dead. Overwhelmed as by a new burden, and haunted by a dark responsibility—that of seeing God’s vengeance brought down upon her father’s murderer—she saw herself at one moment prompting Gordon to kill Ishmael. Why not? There was no other way. Gordon should kill Ishmael Ameer because Ishmael Ameer had killed her father! At the next moment the recollection that Gordon had gone took her back once more to the bitterest part of her suffering. She had always thought that when God made Gordon He had made him without fear, yet he had run away from the consequences of being court-martialled. It was intensely painful to her to despise Gordon, but do what she would she could not help feeling a growing contempt for him. If he had only stood up to his punishment she would have been proud of him, and even if he had been drummed out of the army, or any fate had befallen him less terrible than death, he would have found her standing by his side. But he had fled, he had left her, and being useless for all purposes of righteous vengeance, a woman without a man behind her, she could do nothing now but go back to England.