Without knowing it he groaned aloud as he thought of the ruin all this had come to, and at the next moment he was in the midst of another memory—a memory of the future as he had imagined it would be. They were to be married soon, and then, realising one of the dreams of his life, they were to visit America, for his mother’s blood called to him to go there, to see the great new world—yes, but above all to stand, with Helena’s quivering hand in his, on that rock at Plymouth, where a handful of fearless men and women had landed on a bleak and hungry coast, afraid of no fate, for God was with them, and in two short centuries had peopled a vast continent and created one of the mightiest empires of the earth. Remembering this as a vanished dream, his wretched soul was on the edge of a vortex of madness, and he laughed outright with a laugh that shivered the air around him. Then he was conscious that somebody was speaking to him. It was a young girl in a gaudy silk dress, with a pasty face, lips painted very red, eyebrows darkened, a flower in her full bosom which was covered with transparent lace, and a little satchel swinging on her wrist. "Overdoing it a bit, haven’t you, dear?" she said in French, and she smiled at him, a poor sidelong smile, out of her crushed and crumpled soul. At the same moment he became aware that three men at a table behind him were winking at the girl and joking at his expense. One of them, a little fat American Jew with puffy cheeks, chewing the end of a cigar, was saying— "Guess a man don’t have no use for a hat in a climate like this—sun so soft, and only ninety-nine in the shade." Whereupon an Englishman with a ripped and ragged mouth and a miscellaneous nose, half pug and half Roman, answered— "Been hanging himself up on a nail by the breast of his coat, too, you bet." Putting his hand to his hair and looking down at the torn cloth of his tunic, Gordon realised for the first time that he was bareheaded, having left his helmet at the Citadel, and that to the unclean consciousness of the people about him he was drunk. At that moment he started up suddenly, and coming into collision with the American, who was swinging on the back legs of his chair, he sent him sprawling on the ground, where he yelled— "Here, I say, you blazing——" But the third man at the table, a dragoman in a fez, whispered— "Hush! I know that gentleman. Leave him alone, sirs, please. Let him go." With heart and soul aflame, Gordon walked away, intending to take the first cab that came along and then forgetting to do so. One wild thought now took possession of him and expelled all other thoughts. He must go back to the Citadel and accuse the General of his gross injustice. He must say what he meant to say when he stood by the door as he was going out. The General should hear it—he should, and by —— he must!