Involuntarily, seeing the error that Ishmael had fallen into, Gordon rose to his feet, whereupon Ishmael, mistaking the gesture, held up his hand.
"No," he said, "not that! I have not come to do that. I put my honour in your hands, Omar Benani. I made you free of my family. Could I have done more? You were my brother, yet you outraged the sacred rights of brotherhood. You tore open the secret chamber of my heart. You deceived me, and robbed me and betrayed me, and you are a traitor. But I am not here to avenge myself. Sit, sit. I will tell you what I have come for."
Breathless and bewildered, Gordon sat again, and after another moment of silence, Ishmael, with the light of a wild sorrow in his face, said—
"Omar Benani, there is one who has sacrificed everything for you. She has broken her vows for you, sinned for you, suffered for you. That woman is my wife, and by all the rights of a husband I could hold her. But her heart is yours, and therefore ... therefore I intend to give her up."
Involuntarily Gordon rose to his feet again, and again Ishmael held up his hand.
"But if I liberate her," he said, "if I divorce her, you must marry her. That is what I have come to say."
Utterly amazed and dumbfounded, Gordon could not at first find words to speak, whereupon Ishmael, mistaking his silence, said—
"You need not be afraid of scandal. My people know something about the letter that was sent into Cairo, but neither my people nor yours know anything of the motives that inspired it. Therefore nobody except ourselves will understand the reason for what is done."
He paused as if waiting for a reply, and then said in a voice that quavered with emotion—
"Can it be possible that you hesitate? Do you suppose I am offering to you what I do not wish to keep for myself? I tell you that if that poor girl could say that her feeling for me was the same as before you came between us.... But no, that is impossible! God, who is on high, looks down on what I am doing, and He knows that it is right."