"This is the morning of the day of the festivities, and from Hafiz, by the instrumentality of one who would live or die or give her immortal soul for me, I have at length learned all the facts of my father's coup.
"Did you ever hear of the incident of the Opera House? Well, this incident is to be a replica of that, though the parts to be played in the drama are in danger of being differently cast.
"As this is the last letter I shall be able to send to you before an event which may decide one way or other the fate of England in Egypt, my father's fate, Ishmael's, and perhaps yours and mine, I must tell you as much as I dare commit to paper.
"The British army, as I foresaw from the first, is being brought back to Cairo. It is to come in to-night as quietly as possible by the last trains arriving at Calioub. The Consul-General is to go to Ghezirah as if nothing were about to happen, but at the last moment, when his enemies have been gathered under one roof—Ministers, Diplomats, Notables, Ulema—when the operation of their plot has begun, and the bridge is drawn and the island is isolated, and Ishmael and his vast following are making ready to enter the city, my father is to speak over the telephone to the officer commanding at Abbassiah, and then the soldiers, with fifty rounds of ammunition, are to march into Cairo and line up in the streets.
"Such is my father's coup, and to make sure of the complete success of it—that Ishmael's following is on the move, and that no conspirator (myself above all) escapes—he has given orders to the Colonel not to stir one man out of the barracks until he receives his signal. Well, my work to-night is to see that he never receives it.
"Already you will guess what I am going to do. I must go to the dinner in order to do it, for both the central office of the telephone and the office of the telegraph are now under the roofs of the Ghezirah Palace and Pavilion.
"I hate to do the damnable thing, but it must be done. It must, it must! There is no help for it.
"I cannot tell you how hard it is to me to be engaged in a secret means to frustrate my father's plans—it is like fighting one's own flesh and blood, and is not fair warfare. Neither can I say what a struggle it has been to me as an English soldier to make up my mind to intercept an order of the British army—it is like playing traitor, and I can scarcely bear to think of it.
"But all the same I know it is necessary. I also know God knows it is necessary, and when I think of that my heart beats wildly.
"It is necessary to prevent the massacre which I know (and my father does not) would inevitably ensue; necessary to save my father himself from the execration of the civilised world; necessary to save Ishmael from the tragic consequences of his determined fanaticism; necessary to save England from the possible loss of her Mohammedan dominions, from being faithless to her duty as a Christian nation, and from the divine judgment which will overtake her if she wantonly destroys her great fame as the one Western power that seems designed by Providence to rule and to guide the Eastern peoples; and necessary above all to save the white man and the black man from a legacy of hatred that would divide them for another hundred years and put back the union of races and faiths for countless centuries.