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Updated: April 30, 2025
She imagined Stella propped up on her elbow in bed, wide-eyed with terror, listening and listening to the light footsteps of the drunken brute beyond the partition-wall, shivering when they approached, dropping back with the dew of her sweat upon her forehead when they retired; and these pictures she translated in words for Thresk in her house on the Khamballa Hill.
But on the other hand he read that he himself, Henry Thresk, having brought his case to a successful conclusion, had left India yesterday by the mail-steamer Madras, bound for Marseilles. He threw down the paper and went to the telephone-box. If the news were true the one person likely to know of it was Mrs. Repton. Thresk rang up the house on the Khamballa Hill and asked to speak to her.
All that morning she had been expecting a telephone message or a telegram or a note scribbled on board the steamer and sent up the Khamballa Hill by a messenger. But not a token had come from him and now of the boat which was carrying him to England there was nothing left but the stain of its smoke upon the sky. Mrs.
The Reptons lived upon the Khamballa Hill and the bow-window of their drawing-room looked down upon the Arabian Sea and southwards along the coast towards Malabar Point. In this embrasure Mrs. Repton sat through a morning, denying herself to her friends. A book lay open on her lap but her eyes were upon the sea.
But it could not be all the truth. There was something behind it something rather grim and terrible. Thresk walked to the door of the hotel and called up a motor-car. "Tell him to drive to the Khamballa Hill," he said to the porter. "I'll let him know when to stop." The porter translated the order and Thresk stopped him at Mrs. Repton's door.
The Reptons, it appeared, were responsible to him for the conduct of the case. He had not any knowledge of Stella Ballantyne's destination, and he pointed to a stack of telegrams and letters as confirmation of his words. "They will all go up to Khamballa Hill," he said. "I have no other address." The next day, however, a little note of gratitude came to Thresk through the post.
She yielded to an impulse with which they had nothing whatever to do, an impulse so overmastering that even to the Reptons her precipitancy wore a look of ingratitude. She drove home with Jane Repton as soon as she was released, to the house on Khamballa Hill, and while she was still in the carriage she said: "I must go away to-morrow morning."
A steamer would be starting for Port Said in two days and by that steamer he would travel. That Stella was in the house on the Khamballa Hill he did not doubt, but since she had no word or thought to spare for him he could not but turn his back and go. Stella herself got up to dinner, and after it was over she told her friends of the longing which filled her soul.
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