The Chaplain was a well-nurtured person, who talked comfort out of a full stomach with the expansiveness which sometimes comes to clergy who live long amongst soldiers.
"I have come to say, my dear young lady, that I place myself entirely at your service. With your permission I will charge myself with all the sad and necessary duties. So sudden! So unexpected! How true that in the midst of life we are in death!"
There was more coin from the same mint, and then, the shaft of deadly lightning as before.
"It is perhaps the saddest fact of death in this Eastern climate that burial follows so closely after it. As there seems to be no sufficient reason to believe that the General's death has been due to any but natural causes, it will probably be to-morrow—I say it will probably——"
"Sufficient!" said Helena, and, with a new poison at her heart, she hurried away to her father's room.
She found the General where they had placed him, on his own bed and in his uniform. His eyes were now closed, his features were composed, and everything about him was suggestive of a peaceful end.
While she was standing in the gloomy, echoless chamber, the Consul-General came in and stood beside her. Though he faintly simulated his natural composure he was deeply shaken. For a moment he looked down at his dead friend in silence, while his eyelids blinked and his lips trembled. Then he took Helena's hand, and drawing her aside, he said—
"This is a blow to all of us, my child, but to you it is a great and terrible one."
She did not reply, but stood with her dry eyes looking straight before her.
"I have made strict inquiry, and I am satisfied—entirely satisfied—that your father died by the visitation of God."