Chapter I

"SERAI FUM EL KHALIG,
"CAIRO.

"MY DEAREST HELENA,--Here I am, you see, and I am not arrested, although I travelled in the same train with the Sirdar, met him face to face on the platform at Khartoum, again on the platform at Atbara, again on the landing place at Shelal, and finally in the station at Cairo, where he was received on his arrival by his officers of the Egyptian army, by my father's first Secretary, and by the Commandant of Police.

"I was asking myself what this could mean, whether your black boy had reached his destination, and if your letter had been delivered, when suddenly I became aware that I was being observed, watched and followed to this house, and by that I knew that in this land of mystery my liberty was to be allowed to me a little longer for reasons I have still to fathom.

"This is the home of the Chancellor of El Azhar, and I have delivered Ishmael's letter announcing the change of plan whereby I have come into Cairo instead of him, but I have pledged the good old man to secrecy on that subject, for the present at all events, giving him my confident assurance that in common with the best of the Ulema he is being wickedly deceived and made an innocent instrument for the destruction of his own cause.

"My dear Helena, I was right. My vague suspicions of that damnable intriguer the Grand Cadi were justified. Already I realise that after fruitless efforts to inveigle Ishmael into schemes of anarchical rebellion it was he who conceived the conspiracy, which has taken our friend by storm, in the form of a passive mutiny of the Egyptian army. The accursed scoundrel knows well it cannot be passive, that somewhere and somehow it will break into active resistance, but that is precisely what he desires. As I told you, it is the old trick of Caiaphas over again, and that is the lowest, meanest, dirtiest thing in history.

"Query, is he playing the same game with the Consul-General? I am sure he is, and when I think that England and my father may be in as much danger as Egypt and Ishmael from the man's devilish machinations, I am more than ever certain that Providence had a purpose in bringing me to Cairo, and I feel reconciled to the necessity of living here in this threefold disguise, being one thing to Ishmael, another to the Grand Cadi and Co., and a third to the Government and police. I feel reconciled too, or almost reconciled, to the necessity of leaving you where you are, for the present at all events, although it rips me like a sword-cut as often as I think of it.

"I have sent for Hafiz and expect to hear through him what is happening at the Agency, but I am hoping he will not come until morning, for to-night I can think of nothing but ourselves. When I left you at Khartoum I felt that higher powers were constraining and controlling me, and that I was only yielding at last to an overwhelming sense of fatality. I thought I had made every possible effort, had exhausted every means and had nothing to reproach myself with, but hardly had I got away into the desert when a hand seemed to grasp me at the back of my neck and to say, 'Why did you leave her behind?'

"In Ishmael's house and in that atmosphere of delirious ecstasy in the mosque it was easy to think it necessary for you to remain, otherwise my purpose in going away must from the first be frustrated, but awakening in the morning in my native compartment, with men and boys lying about on sacks, the sandy daylight filtering through the closed shutters of the carriage and the train full of the fetid atmosphere of exhausted sleep, I could not help but protest to myself that at any cost whatever I should have found a way to bring you with me.

"Thank God, if I have left you behind in that trying and false position it is with no Khalifa, no corrupt and concupiscent fanatic, but a man of the finest and purest instincts, who is too much occupied with his spiritual mission, praise the Lord, to think of the beautiful woman by his side, so I tell myself it was the will of Providence, and there is nothing to do now but to leave ourselves in the hands of fate.

"Good-night, dearest! _D.V._ I'll write again to-morrow."