"Afraid I must go. Just heard that some of the Egyptian soldiers have been knocking down the officers who were sent to remove their ammunition."
At that news, which appeared to confirm predictions and to be the beginning of everything he had been led to expect, the Consul-General lost all control of himself.
"Wait! Wait a little and we'll go together," he whispered back, and then, calling for silence, he rose to his feet again and faced full upon his guests.
"Your Highness, your Eminences, your Excellencies, and Gentlemen," he said in a loud voice, "I have one more toast. I have given you the health of the King, and now I give you 'Confusion to his Enemies.'"
If a bomb had fallen in the dining-hall it could scarcely have made more commotion. The Consul-General saw this and smiled.
"Yes, gentlemen, I say his enemies, and when I speak of the King's enemies, I refer to his enemies in Egypt, his enemies in this room."
The sensation produced by these words was compounded of many emotions. To such of the guests as were entirely innocent of conspiracy it seemed plainly evident that a kind of mental vertigo had seized the Consul-General. One of them looked round for a doctor, another rose from his seat with the intention of stepping up to the speaker, while a third took out his gold pencil-case and began to scribble a note to the Sirdar, asking him, as the best friend of their host, to remove the Consul-General from the room.
On the other hand, the persons who were actually participating in conspiracy had, by operation of that inscrutable instinct which compels guilty men to expose themselves, risen to their feet, and were loudly shouting their protests.
"Untrue!" "Disgraceful!" "False!" "Utterly false!"
"False, is it?" said the Consul-General. "We shall see."