Helena smiled (a watery smile) and declared she would go if Hafiz would go with her. Hafiz was ready, and in less than half-an-hour they were driving up to the Citadel in the Princess's carriage with the footmen and saises and eunuch which her Highness, for all her emancipation, thought necessary to female propriety in public.
Everything went well until they reached the fortress, and then, going up the stone staircase to Gordon's quarters, Helena began to tremble more than ever.
"Oh! Oh! I daren't! I must go home," she whispered.
"Lord, no! not now," said Hafiz. "Remember,—up there is some one who thinks he is going to die, while here are we who know he isn't, and that life will be doubly sweet if it's you that takes it back to him. Come, sister, come!"
"Give me your arm, then," said Helena, and, panting with emotion and perilously near to the point of tears, she went up, on shaking limbs, to a door at which two soldiers, armed to the teeth, were standing on guard.
At that moment Gordon, in the officer's bright room which had been given to him as a cell, was leaning on the sill of the open window looking steadfastly down at some object in the white city below. During the past six days he had known what was being done on his behalf, and the desire for life, which he had thought dead in him, had quickened to suspense and pain.
To ease both feelings he had smoked innumerable cigarettes and made pretence of reading the illustrated papers which his brother-officers had poured in upon him, out of their otherwise dumb and helpless sympathy. But every few minutes of every day he had leaned out of the window to look first, with a certain pang, at the heavy-lidded house which contained his father; next, with a certain sense of tears, at a green spot covered with cypress trees which contained all that was left of his mother, and finally, with a certain yearning, at the trellised Eastern palace of the Princess Nazimah, which contained Helena.
This is what he was doing at the moment when Helena and Hafiz were ascending the stairs, and just as he was asking himself for the hundredth time why Helena did not come to see him, he heard his guard's gruff tones mingled with a woman's mellow voice.
A deep note among the soft ones sent all the blood in his body galloping to his heart, and turning round he saw the door of his room open and Helena herself on the threshold.
One moment she stood there, with her sweet, care-worn face growing red in her passion of joy, and then she rushed at him and fell on his breast, throwing both arms about his neck, and crying—