Meantime Helena in Khartoum was feeling like a miserable traitress.
She had condemned an innocent man to death! Ishmael had not killed her father, yet she had taken such steps that the moment he entered Cairo he would be walking to his doom!
One after another sweet and cruel memories crowded upon her, and in the light of the awful truth as Gordon had revealed it, she began to see Ishmael with quite different eyes. All she had hitherto thought evil in his character now looked like good; what she had taken for hypocrisy was sincerity; what she had supposed to be subtlety was simplicity. His real nature was a rebuke to every one of her preconceived ideas. The thought of his tenderness, his modesty, his devotion, and even the unselfishness which had led to their betrothal, cut her to the heart. Yet she had doomed him to destruction. The letter she had written to the Consul-General was his death-warrant.
That night she could fix her mind on nothing except the horror of her position, but next morning she set herself to think out schemes for stopping the consequences of her own act.
The black boy was gone; it was not possible to overtake him; there was no other train to Egypt for four days, but there was the telegraph—she could make use of that.
"I'll telegraph to the Consul-General to pay no attention to my letter," she thought.
Useless! The Consul-General would ask himself searching questions and take his precautions just the same.
"I'll telegraph that my letter is a forgery," she thought.
Madness! The Consul-General would ask himself how, if it was a forgery, she could know anything about it.
"I'll go across to the Sirdar and tell him everything, and leave him to act for both of us as he thinks best!"