"I don’t understand what is happening, dear, but you must never let anybody poison your mind against your father. He may be a little hard sometimes—I’m not denying that; but then he is not to be judged like other men—he is really not, you know. He would cut off his right hand if he thought it had done him a wrong, but he is very tender to those he loves, and he loves you, dear, and wants to do so much for you. It was pitiful to hear him last night, Gordon. ’I feel as if my enemy has stolen my own son,’ he said. ’My own son, my own son,’ he kept saying, until I could have cried, and I couldn’t sleep for thinking of it. You won’t let anybody poison your mind against your father—promise me you won’t, dear." Gordon comforted and kissed her, and rallied her and laughed, but he felt for a moment as if he had come back as a traitor to destroy the happiness of home. Fatimah followed him out of the room, and winking to keep back her tears, she whispered some disconnected story of what had happened on the day on which his father received his letter. "Oh, my eye, my soul, it was sad! We could hear his footsteps in his bedroom all night long. Sometimes he was speaking to himself. ’The scoundrels!’ ’They don’t know what shame is!’ ’Haven’t I had enough? And now he too! My son, my son!’" Gordon went downstairs with a slow and heavy step. He felt as if everything were conspiring to make him abandon his purpose. "Why can’t I leave things alone?" he thought. But just as he reached the hall the Egyptian Prime Minister, who was going out of the house, passed in front of him without seeing him, and a certain sinister look in the man’s sallow face wiped out in an instant all the softening effect of the scenes upstairs. "Take care!" he thought. "Tell him the truth whatever happens." When he entered the library he expected his father to fly out at him, but the old man was very quiet. "Sit down—I shall be ready in a moment," he said, and he continued to write without raising his eyes. Gordon saw that his father’s face was more than usually furrowed and severe, and a voice seemed to say to him, "Don’t be afraid!" So he walked over to the window and tried to look at the glistening waters of the Nile and the red wedges of Pyramids across the river. "Well, I received your letter," said the old man after a moment. "But what was the nonsensical reason you gave me for not doing your duty?" It was the brusque tone he had always taken with his secretaries when they were in the wrong, but it was a blunder to adopt it with Gordon, who flushed up to the forehead, wheeled round from the window, walked up to the desk, and said, beginning a little hesitatingly but gathering strength as he went on— "My reason, Father ... for not doing my ... what I was sent to do ... was merely that I found I could not do it without being either a rascal or a fool." The old man flinched and his glasses fell. "Explain yourself," he said.