Still drawing the hem of her handkerchief through her fingers, Helena shook her head. "I’m sorry for that, dear, very sorry." Arriving in London was so trying, so bewildering, especially to a woman. Such crowds, such confusion! It always made her feel so helpless. And then she had the Consul-General to look after her, and once Gordon had come to meet her too. He was at the Staff College at that time, and before she alighted from the carriage she had seen him forging his way down the platform, and he kissed his hand to her—— But the sweet old thing could bear up no longer, and while Helena pressed her handkerchief to her lips, she said— "O Helena, how happy we might have been! It’s wrong of me, I know it’s wrong, but I can’t reconcile myself to it even yet. ’Why is my life prolonged?’ I have often thought, and then I have told myself it was because God intended that I should live to see my dear children happy. Ah, my darling, it would have been so beautiful! My children and perhaps my children’s children. If I could only have seen them all together once! It would have been so easy to go then. But now my son is gone—I don’t know what has become of him—and my daughter—my sweet daughter that was to be——" Helena sank to her knees. "Mother!" she said, and burying her face in Lady Nuneham’s shoulder, she felt, for the first time in her life, that a mother’s heart was beating against her own. After a while the old lady, whose arms had been about Helena’s neck, began to stroke her forehead and the top of her head and to say in a calmer voice— "It was wrong of me to repine, dear. Happiness does not depend on us. It depends on God, and we should leave everything to Him. He will do what is best. I’m sure He will." Then in a nervous way she attempted to defend Gordon. They were not to be too hard on him. No doubt he thought he was doing what was right. "And he was, too, wasn’t he? In a sense at least. Don’t you think so, Helena?" Helena could not answer, but she made a helpless motion with her head. They were not to suppose he meant to forsake them either, and if he had fled away he was not thinking of himself only—they might be sure of that. He never did—never had done—never once since he was a child. "You couldn’t give him a handful of sweets when he was a boy but he asked for another for Hafiz." Perhaps he was thinking of his father—that if he gave himself up and there was an inquiry, a court-martial, the Consul-General would suffer in his influence in Egypt and his esteem in England. Perhaps he was thinking of Helena herself—that it might seem as if her father’s death had been hastened by the painful scene with himself. And perhaps he was thinking a little of his mother, too—of the pain she would suffer at sight of her husband and her son at war before the world.