Torn as he was to his heart’s core, outraged as he believed himself to be, he made a feeble effort to excuse himself. "I couldn’t help it, Helena,—it was impossible for me to act otherwise." "Oh, I know! I know!" she said. "You were doing what you thought to be right. But I am no match for you. You have duties that are higher than your duty to me." Her tone cut him to the quick, and he tried to speak but could not. Like a drowning man he stretched out his hand to her, but she made no response. [Illustration: He stretched out his hand to her, but she made no response] "It was not to be, I see that now," she said, while her eyes filled and her bosom heaved. "I am not worthy of you. But I loved you and I thought you loved me, and I believed you when you told me that nothing could come between us." Again he tried to speak, to explain, to protest, but his tongue would not utter a sound. "If you had really loved me you would have been ready to ... even to.... But I was mistaken and I am punished, and this is how it is to end!" "Helena, for God’s sake—" he began, but he could bear no more. He did not see that the girl’s love was fighting with her pride. The hideous injustice of it all was working like madness in his brain, and after a moment he turned to go. As he walked across the garden the ground under his feet sounded hollow in his ears like the ground above a new-covered grave. When he reached the gate he thought he heard Helena calling in a pleading, sobbing voice— "Gordon!" But when he turned to look back she had disappeared. Then bareheaded, without helmet or sword, with every badge of rank and honour gone, he pulled the gate open and staggered into the square. *CHAPTER XXV* Helena returned to her father’s room, and found the two old men getting ready to go. In the Pasha’s face there were traces of that impulse to smile which comes to shallow natures in the presence of another person’s troubles. But the face of the Consul-General was a tragic sight. The square-set jaw hung low, and the eyes were heavy as with unshed tears. It was easy to see that the iron man was deeply moved—that the depths of his ice-bound soul were utterly broken up. Only in short, disjointed sentences did he speak at all. It was about his enemies—the corrupt, cruel, and hypocritical upholders of the old dark ways. They had bided their time; they had taken their revenge; they had hit him at last where he could least bear a blow; they had struck him in the face with the hand of his only son. "There is no shame left in them," he said, and then he turned to Helena as if intending to say some word of sympathy. He wanted to tell her that he had hoped for other things, and would have been happy if they had come to pass. But when he saw the girl standing before him with her red eyes and pale cheeks, he hesitated, grasped her hand, held it for a moment, and then walked away without a word.