Helena was now Ishmael’s wife—betrothed to him by the most sacred pledges of Mohammedan law. If the barrier of blood which had kept him from Helena had been removed, the barrier of marriage which kept Helena from him remained.
"What can we do?" he asked himself, and for a long time he saw no answer.
In the fierce struggle that followed, honour and duty seemed to say, that inasmuch as Helena had entered into this union of her own free will—however passively acquiescing in its strange conditions—she must abide by it, and he must leave her where she was and crush down his consuming passion, which was an unholy passion now. But honour and duty are halting and timorous guides in the presence of love, and when Gordon came to think of Helena as the actual wife of Ishmael he was conscious of nothing but the flame that was burning at his heart’s core.
Remembering what Helena had told him, and what he had seen since he came to that house, he reminded himself that after all the marriage was only a marriage _pro formâ_, a promise made under the mysterious compulsion of fate, a contract of convenience and perhaps generosity on the one side, and on the other side of dark and calculating designs which would not bear to be thought of any longer, being a result of the blind leading of awful passions under circumstances of the most irresistible provocation.
When he came to think of love he was dead to everything else. Ishmael did not love Helena, whereas he, Gordon, loved her with all his heart and soul and strength. She was everything in life to him, and though he might have gone to his death without her, it was impossible to live and leave her behind him.
Thinking so, he began to conjure up the picture of a time when Ishmael, under the influence of Helena’s beauty and charm, might perhaps forget the bargain between them, and claim his rights as a husband, and then the thought of her beautiful head with its dark curling locks as it lay in his arms that day lying in the arms of the Arab, with Ishmael’s swarthy face above her, so tortured him that it swept away every other consideration.
"It must not, shall not, cannot be!" he told himself.
And that brought him to the final thought that since he loved Helena, and since Helena loved him and not her husband, their position in Ishmael’s house was utterly false and wrong, and could not possibly continue.