"Since my interview with the Grand Cadi I have learned of a certainty, what I had already surmised, that the Consul-General has been made aware of the whole plot, and is taking his own measures to defeat it. Undoubtedly the first duty of a Government is to preserve order and to establish authority, and I know my father well enough to be sure that at any cost he will set himself to do both. But what will happen?
"Mark my word, the British army will be ordered back to the Capital—perhaps on the eve of the festival—and as surely as it enters the city on the night of the King's Birthday there will be massacre in the streets, for the Egyptian soldiers will rebel, and the people who have been provided with arms from the Secret Service money of England's enemies will rise, thinking the object of the Government is to prevent the entrance of Ishmael and his followers.
"Result—a holy war; and as that is the only kind of war that was ever yet worth waging, it will put Egypt in the right and England in the wrong.
"Does Ishmael expect this? No; he thinks he is to make a peaceful entry into Cairo when he comes to establish his World State, his millennium of universal faith and empire. Do the Ulema expect it? No; they think the Army of Occupation will be far away when their crazy scheme is carried into effect. Does my father expect it? Not for one moment, so sure is he—I know it perfectly, I have heard him say it a score of times—that the Egyptian soldier will not fight alone, and that Egyptian civilians can be scattered by a water-hose.
"Heaven help him! If ever a man was preparing to draw a sword from its scabbard it is my father at this moment, but it is only because he is played upon and deceived by this son and successor of Caiaphas the damned. I'll go and open his eyes to the Grand Cadi's duplicity. I'll say, 'Bring your oily scoundrel face to face with me, and see what I will say. If he denies it, you must choose for yourself which of us you will believe—your own son, who has nothing to gain by coming back to warn you, or this reptile who is fighting for the life of his rotten old class.'
"The thing is hateful to me, and if there were any other possible way of stopping the wretched slaughter I should not go, for I know it will end in the Consul-General handing me over to the military authorities to be court-martialled for my former offences, and, as you may say, it is horrible to put a father, with a high sense of duty, into the position of being compelled to cut off his own son.
"Meanwhile I am conscious that the police continue to watch me, and I am just as much a prisoner as if I were already within the walls of a jail. For their own purposes they are leaving me at liberty, and I believe they will go on doing so until after the night of the King's Birthday. After that, God knows what will happen.
"I am writing late, and I must turn in soon, so good-night, and God bless and preserve you, my own darling—mine, mine, mine, and nobody else's, remember that! Hafiz continues to protest that the Prophet has a love for you, and will bring out everything for the best. I think so too—I really do, so you must not be frightened about anything I have said in this letter.
"There is only one thing frightens me, and that is the damnable trick memory plays me when it rakes up all you told me of the terms of your betrothal to Ishmael. I can bear it pretty well during the day, but in that dead grey hour of the early morning, when the moonlight slinks into the dawn, before the sparrows begin to chop the air and the Arabs to rend it, I find myself thinking that though Ishmael, when he proposed marriage to you, may have been thinking of nothing but how to protect your good name, being a pure-minded man who had consecrated his life to a spiritual mission, yet the constant presence of a beautiful woman by his side must sooner or later sweep away his pledge.
"He wouldn't be a man if it didn't, and, the prophet notwithstanding, Ishmael is that to his finger-tips. But heaven help me! I daren't let my mind dwell on this subject, or I should have to fly back to you and leave my task here unfulfilled. So as often as I shut my eyes and see you trudging through the desert in Ishmael's caravan, I tell myself that Providence has something for you to do there—must have—though what the deuce it is, I don't yet see.