"Your happiness is dearer to me than anything else in life, dear, but I am a man, not a child, and if I am to follow your father in order not to lose you, I must know why. Will you tell me?" Without raising her eyes Helena answered, "No!" "Very well!" he said. "In that case it must be as the fates determine," and straightening his sword-belt, he stepped to the door. Helena looked up at him and in a fluttering voice called "Gordon!" He turned, with his hand on the handle. "What is it?" For one instant she had an impulse to break her promise and tell him of her father’s infirmity, but at the next moment she thought of the Egyptian, and her pride and jealousy conquered. "What is it, Helena?" "Nothing," she said, and fled into her bedroom. Gordon looked after her until she had disappeared, and then—hot, angry, nervous, less able than before to meet the ordeal before him—he turned the handle of the door and entered the General’s office. *CHAPTER XXIII* The Consul-General, the General, and the Egyptian Pasha in his tarboosh were sitting in a half-circle; the General’s Military Secretary, Captain Graham, was writing at the desk, and his Aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Robson, was standing beside it. Nobody was speaking as Gordon entered, and the air of the room had the dumb emptiness which goes before a storm. The General signalled to Gordon to sit, and requested his Aide-de-camp to step out and wait in his own office, and then said, speaking in a jerky, nervous way— "Gordon, I have an order of the utmost importance to give you, but before I do so your father has something to say." With that he took a seat by the side of the desk, while the Consul-General, without changing the direction of his eyes, said slowly and deliberately— "I need hardly tell you, Gordon, that the explanation I am about to make would be quite unnecessary in the case of an ordinary officer receiving an ordinary command, but I have decided to make it to you out of regard to the fact of who you are and what your relation to the General is to be." Gordon bowed without speaking. He was struggling to compose himself, and something was whispering to him, "Above all things, be calm!" "I regret to say the Ulema have ignored the order which his Excellency sent to them," said the Consul-General, indicating the Pasha. "Ignored?" "That’s what it comes to, though it’s true they asked me to receive the man Ishmael Ameer and to consider a suggestion." "You did, sir?" "I did. The man came, I saw him, and heard what he had to say—and now I am more than ever convinced that he is a public peril." "A peril?" "First, because he advises officers and men to abstain from military service on the ground that war is incompatible with religion. That is opposed to the existing. order of society, and therefore harmful to good government." "I agree," said the General, swinging restlessly in his revolving chair.