"Is life, then, to be utterly closed to me?" he thought.
Was he neither to die for his crime nor live for his repentance? Had God Almighty set His face against both?
He thought of Helena as she would be in England, alone like himself, cut off for the rest of her life from every happiness except the bitter one of her memory of their few short days together, thinking ill of him, as she needs must for leaving her in her sore need, while all the time his heart was yearning for love of her and he would have given his soul to be by her side, but for the barrier of blood which now seemed to separate them forever.
And then in the bitterness of his remorse and the depths of his abased penitence, thinking the Almighty Himself must be against him, he began to pray—never having prayed since the days when his mother held him to her knee.
"O God, have pity upon me," he cried, as he sat huddled up on his bed. "I only intended to do what was right, yet I have plunged everybody I love into trouble. What can I do? Where can I go? Let it be anything and anywhere! O Lord, speak to me, lead me, deliver me, tell me what I ought to do; tell me, tell me!"
The green-shaded lamp on the table had gone out by this time, the darkness of the night had gone, and a dim gleam of saffron-tinted light from the dawn had begun to filter through the yellow window curtains of the room.
Then suddenly the silence of the little, pulseless place was broken by the sound of eager footsteps running over the gravel path of the courtyard and leaping up the stone staircase of the house.
It was Hafiz returning from the cemetery.
CHAPTER IX
The Mohammedan cemetery of Cairo lies to the north-east of the city, outside the Bab-en-Nasr (the Gate of Victory), on the fringe of the desert, and down a dusty road that leads to a group of tomb-mosques of the Caliphs, now old and falling into decay.