much worse."

"What do you mean?"

"Ballantyne was found in the morning outside the tent stone-cold. But
no one had heard the shot, and there were sentries on the edge of the
encampment. He had been dragged outside after he was dead or when he
was dying."

A low cry broke from Thresk. The weak point became of a sudden the most
deadly, the most terrible element in the whole case. He could hear the
prosecuting counsel making play with it. He stood for a moment lost in
horror. Repton had no further word to say to him. Mrs. Repton had never
once spoken. They wanted him away, out of the room, out of the house.
Some insight let him into the meaning of her silence. In the presence of
this tragedy remorse had gripped her. She was looking upon herself as one
who had plotted harm for Stella. She would never forgive Thresk for his
share in the plot.

Thresk went out of the room without a word more to either Repton or his
wife. Whatever he did now he must do by himself. He would not be admitted
into that house again. He closed the door of the room behind him, and
hardly had he closed it when he heard the snap of a switch and the line
of light under the door vanished. Once more there was darkness in the
drawing-room. Repton no doubt had returned to his wife's side and they
were huddled again side by side on the sofa. Thresk walked down the hill
with a horrible feeling of isolation and loneliness. But he shook it off
as he neared the lights of Bombay.

CHAPTER XI

THRESK INTERVENES

Thresk reached his hotel with some words ringing in his head which Jane
Repton had spoken to him at Mrs. Carruthers' dinner-party:

"You can get any single thing in life you want if you want it enough, but
you cannot control the price you will have to pay for it. That you will
only learn afterwards and gradually."

He had got what he had wanted--the career of distinction, and he wondered
whether he was to begin now to learn its price.

He mounted to his sitting-room on the second floor, avoiding the lounge
and the lift and using a small side staircase instead of the great
central one. He had passed no one on the way. In his room he looked upon
the mantelshelf and on the table. No visitor had called on him that day;
no letter awaited him. For the first time since he had landed in India a
day had passed without some resident leaving on him a card or a note of
invitation. The newspapers gave him the reason. He was supposed to have
left o