Gordon hesitated for a moment, and the General said— "Give it me—give it me." Then with a rapid gesture Gordon unbuckled his sword from the belt and handed it to the General. The General held it in both his hands, which were vibrating like the parts of an engine from the moving power within, while he said, in the same half-stifled voice as before— "You have had the greatest opportunity that ever came to an English soldier and—thrown it away. You have humiliated your father, outraged the love of your intended wife, and insulted England. Therefore you are a traitor!" Gordon quivered visibly at that word, and seeing this, the General hurled it at him again. "A traitor, I say. A traitor who has consorted with the enemies of his country." With that he drew the sword from its scabbard, broke it across his knee, and flung the fragments at Gordon’s feet. Helena turned and fled from the room in agony at the harrowing scene, and the Consul-General, unable to bear the sight of it, rose and walked to the window, his face broken up with pain as no one had ever seen it before. Then the General, who had been worked up to a towering rage by his own words and acts, lost himself utterly, and saying— "You are unfit to wear the decorations of an English soldier. Take them off, take them off!" he laid hold of Gordon’s medals—the Distinguished Service Order, the South African Medal with its four clasps, the British Soudan Medal, the Medjidieh, and the Khedive’s star—and tore them from his tunic, ripping pieces of the cloth away with them, and threw them on the ground. Then in a voice like the scream of a wild bird, he cried— "Now go! Go back to your quarters and consider yourself under arrest. Or take my advice and be off altogether. Quit the army you have dishonoured and the friends you have disgraced and hide your infamous conduct in some foreign land. Leave the room at once!" Gordon had stood through this gross indignity bolt upright and without speaking. His face had become deadly white and his colourless lower lip had trembled. At the end, while the old General was taking gusts of breath, he tried to say something, but his tongue refused to speak. At length he staggered rather than walked to the door, and with his hand on the handle he turned and said quietly, but in a voice which his father never forgot— "General, the time may come when it will be even more painful to you to remember all this than it has been to me to bear it." Then he stumbled out of the room. *CHAPTER XXIV* Out in the hall he had an impulse to turn towards Helena’s room on the right, but through his half-blind eyes he saw Helena herself on the left, standing by the open entrance to the garden, with her handkerchief at her mouth. "Helena!" She made a little nervous cry, but stifling it in her throat she turned hotly round on him. "You told me that love was above everything," she said, "and this is how you love me!"