"Listen to me, my dear. I'm a woman of experience at all events. Have a good cry and get him out of your head. Why not? He's gone, isn't he? He can never come back to the army, and his career as a soldier is at an end. The felled tree doesn't bear any more dates, so what's the good of him anyway? Oh, I know! You needn't tell me! Love is sweet in the suckling and bitter in the weaning, and you think you can't do it, but you can. You are going back to England, I hear. So much the better! Far from the eyes, far from the heart, and quite right too. Get married as soon as possible and have some big bouncing babies. I haven't had any myself certainly, but that's different—I thought I wouldn't repeat the crime of my mother, God forgive her!"
Helena's head was down; she was hardly listening.
"Lose no time either, my sweet. Time is money, they say, and perhaps it is, though it has different prices on the Bourse, I notice. I've known days that would have been dear at two piastres and a few quarters of an hour that I wouldn't have parted with for millions of money. Perhaps you've felt like that, my beauty. But perhaps you haven't. You're only a child yet, my chicken."
"The man Ishmael has gone, hasn't he?" asked Helena.
"Yes, they've let him go, the stupids! Back to the Soudan—to Khartoum, they tell me."
"Khartoum?"
"Just like you English! Dunces! Excuse the word. I say what I think. You judge of the East by the West, and can't see that force is the only thing these people understand. I stood it for five days, boiling all over inside, and then I went down to the Agency. 'Good gracious,' I said, 'why has the Government allowed these men to slip through their fingers?' And when Nuneham said he had laid a hundred and fifty of them by the heels, I said 'Tut! Taking water by drops will never fill the water-skin. You should have laid hold of a hundred and fifty thousand, and that man Ishmael above all. But you've let him go—him and his hundred messengers—and now you'll have to take the consequences. Serve you right, too! What was the use of putting down the Arabic press if you let the Arabic preachers go unmolested?'"
"What did he say to that, Princess?"
"He said he had scotched the snake but he was not forgetting the scorpion. It's no use talking, though. Nuneham is a great man, but he has lost his nerve, and is always asking himself what they are saying about him in England. Boobies in Parliament, I suppose, and he wants to be ready to reply to them. But, goodness me, if you throw a missile at every dog that barks at you the stones in your street will be as precious as jewels soon. Oh, I know! I'm a woman of experience."
Helena was staring straight before her.