He turned, with his hand on the handle. "What is it?"
For one instant she had an impulse to break her promise and tell him of her father's infirmity, but at the next moment she thought of the Egyptian, and her pride and jealousy conquered.
"What is it, Helena?"
"Nothing," she said, and fled into her bedroom.
Gordon looked after her until she had disappeared, and then—hot, angry, nervous, less able than before to meet the ordeal before him—he turned the handle of the door and entered the General's office.
CHAPTER XXIII
The Consul-General, the General, and the Egyptian Pasha in his tarboosh were sitting in a half-circle; the General's Military Secretary, Captain Graham, was writing at the desk, and his Aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Robson, was standing beside it. Nobody was speaking as Gordon entered, and the air of the room had the dumb emptiness which goes before a storm. The General signalled to Gordon to sit, and requested his Aide-de-camp to step out and wait in his own office, and then said, speaking in a jerky, nervous way—
"Gordon, I have an order of the utmost importance to give you, but before I do so your father has something to say."
With that he took a seat by the side of the desk, while the Consul-General, without changing the direction of his eyes, said slowly and deliberately—
"I need hardly tell you, Gordon, that the explanation I am about to make would be quite unnecessary in the case of an ordinary officer receiving an ordinary command, but I have decided to make it to you out of regard to the fact of who you are and what your relation to the General is to be."