310 WITH KITCHENEB IN' THE SOUDAN-his father had quarrelled with his own people there must have been many ways open to him of maintaining himself honourably. Therefore he had always thought that although he might have been all that his mother described him— the tenderest and most loving of husbands, a gentleman, and estimable in all respects—his father must have been wanting in energy and ambition, deficient in the qualities that would fit him to fight his own battle, and content to gain a mere competence instead of struggling hard to make his way up the ladder.

He had accounted for his going up as interpreter with Hicks Pasha by the fact that his work with the contractor was at an end, and that he saw no other opening for himself. He now understood how mistaken he had been in his estimate of his father’s character, and wondered even more than before why he should have taken that humble post at Alexandria. His mother had certainly told him again and again that he had done so simply because the doctors had said that she could not live in England; but surely in all the wide empire of England there must be innumerable posts that a gentleman could obtain. Perhaps he should understand it better some day; at present it seemed unaccountable to him. He felt sure that, had he lived, his father would have made a name for himself, and that it was in that hope, and not of the pay that he would receive as an interpreter, that he had gone up with Hicks, and that had he not died at that little village by the Nile he would assuredly have done so, for the narrative he had left behind him would in itself, if published, have shown what stuff there was in him. It was hard that fate should have snatched him away just when it had seemed that his trials were over, that he was on the point of being reunited to his wife. Still, it was a consolation to know he had died suddenly, as one falls in battle, not as a slave worn out by grief and suffering.

As he left his hut he said to Zaki, “ I shall not want you again this evening, but mind, we must be on the move at daylight.”