events--that
she did not easily cry. Ballantyne touched him on the arm.

"You blame me for this."

"I don't know that I do," answered Thresk slowly. He was wondering how
much share in the blame he had himself, he who had ridden with her on the
Downs eight years ago and had let her speak and had not answered. He sat
in this tent to-night with shame burning at his heart. "It wasn't as if I
had no confidence in myself," he argued, unable quite to cast back to the
Thresk of those early days. "I had--heaps of it."

Ballantyne lifted himself out of his chair and lurched over to the
sideboard. Thresk, watching him, fell to wondering why in the world
Stella had married him or he her. He knew that a blind man may see such
mysteries on any day and that a wise one will not try to explain them.
Still he wondered. Had the man's reputation dazzled her?--for undoubtedly
he had one; or was it that intellect which suffered an eclipse when
Ballantyne went into camp with nobody to carry tales?

He was still pondering on that problem when Ballantyne swung back to the
table and set himself to prove, drunk though he was, that his reputation
was not ill-founded.

"I am afraid Stella's not very well," he said, sitting heavily down.
"But she asked me to tell you things, didn't she? Well, her wishes are my
law. So here goes."

His manner altogether changed now that they were alone. He became
confidential, intimate, friendly. He was drunk. He was a coarse
heavy-featured man with bloodshot eyes; he interrupted his conversation
with uneasy glances into the corners of the tent, such glances as Thresk
had noticed when he was alone with him before they sat down to dinner;
but he managed none the less to talk of Rajputana with a knowledge which
amazed Thresk now and would have enthralled him at another time. A
visitor may see the surface of Rajputana much as Thresk had done, may
admire its marble palaces, its blue lakes and the great yellow stretches
of its desert, but to know anything of the life underneath in that
strange secret country is given to few even of those who for long years
fly the British flag over the Agencies. Nevertheless Ballantyne
knew--very little as he acknowledged but more than his fellows. And
groping drunkenly in his mind he drew out now this queer intrigue, now
that fateful piece of history, now the story of some savage punishment
wreaked behind the latticed windows, and laid them one after another
before Thresk's eyes-