t all her radiance had gone, her cheeks trembled, her eyes
pleaded desperately.

"Sorry! I knew you would be. You are not hard. You couldn't be. You must
come close day by day in your life to so much that is pitiful. One can
talk to you and you'll understand. This is my first chance, the first
real chance I have ever had, Henry, the very first."

Thresk looked backwards over the years of Stella Ballantyne's unhappy
life. It came upon him with a shock that what she said was the bare
truth; and remorse followed hard upon the heels of the shock. This was
her first real chance and he himself was to blame that it had come no
earlier. The first chance of a life worth the living--it had been in his
hands to give her and he had refused to give it years ago on Bignor Hill.

"It's quite true," he admitted. "But I don't ask you to give it up,
Stella." She looked at him eagerly. "No! You would have understood that
if you had read my letter instead of tearing it up. I only ask you to
tell your lover the truth."

"He knows it," she said sullenly.

"No!"

"He does! He does!" she protested, her voice rising to a low cry.

"Hush! You'll be heard," said Thresk, and she listened for a moment
anxiously. But there was no sound of any one stirring in the house.

"We are safe here," she said. "No one sleeps above us. Henry, he knows
the truth."

"Would you be here now if he did?"

"I came because this afternoon you seemed to be threatening me. I didn't
understand. I couldn't sleep. I saw the light in this room. I came to ask
you what you meant--that's all."

"I'll tell you what I meant," said Thresk, and Stella with her eyes
fixed upon him sank down upon a chair. "I left my pipe behind me in the
tent on the night I dined with you. Your lover, Stella, doesn't know
that. I came back to fetch it. He doesn't know that. You were standing
by the table--" and Stella Ballantyne broke in upon him to silence the
words upon his lips.

"There was no reason why he should know," she exclaimed. "It had nothing
to do with what happened. We know what happened. There was a thief"--and
Thresk turned to her then with such a look of sheer amazement upon his
face that she faltered and her voice died to a murmur of words--"a lean
brown arm--a hand delicate as a woman's."

"There was no thief," he said quietly. "There was a man delirious with
drink who imagined one. There was you with the bruises on your throat and
the unutterable misery in your eyes