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Updated: June 18, 2025
"Stand there, Henry," she said. A strange composure had succeeded her agitation. "I must tell you something more which I had meant to hide from you the last thing which I have kept back. It will hurt you, I am afraid." There came a change upon Thresk's face. He was steeling himself to meet a blow. "Go on." "It isn't because of his position that I cling to Dick.
The camel knelt; its rider dismounted, and as he dismounted he talked to Thresk's bearer. Something passed from hand to hand and the bearer came back to Thresk with a letter in his hand. "A chit from his Excellency." Thresk tore open the envelope and found within it an invitation to dinner, signed "Stephen Ballantyne." "Your letter has reached me this moment," the note ran. "It came by your train.
The picture of him was impressed during that instant upon Thresk's mind, so that he could never afterwards forget it. "Copper's up one point," he was saying, "that's fine. Who's Captain Ballantyne, I wonder? United Steel has dropped seven-eighths. Well, that doesn't affect me," and so he ran on. Thresk heard no more of what he said.
"Because she knows nothing of it," replied Thresk. The lawyer pointed to a chair. The two men sat down together in the office and it was long before they parted. Within an hour of Thresk's return from the solicitor's office an Inspector of Police waited on him at his hotel and was instantly shown up. "We did not know until to-day," he said, "that you were still in Bombay, Mr. Thresk.
Then very methodically he pulled down the blinds. He did not look at Thresk and Jane Repton on the couch never stirred. Thresk's forebodings became a dreadful certainty. Some evil thing had happened. He might have been in a house of death. He knew that he was not wanted there, that husband and wife wished to be alone and silently resented his presence.
I will tell him of my own free will very soon, Henry. But not now not now." The sound of her sobbing and the sight of her distress wrung Thresk's heart. He lifted her from the ground and held her. "There's another way, Stella," he said gently. "Oh, I know," she answered. She was thinking of the little bottle with the tablets of veronal which stood by her bed, not for the first time that night.
It was thus only by the discovery of Thresk's letter to Captain Ballantyne, which was found crumpled up in a waste-paper basket, that his presence that night in the tent was suspected. "It is strange," the Inspector grumbled, "that you did not come to us of your own accord when you had missed your boat and tell us what you knew."
I will see that dinner is served at once." She went quickly to one of the grass-screens and lifting it vanished from his view. It seemed to Thresk that she had just seized upon an excuse to get away. Why? he asked himself. She was nervous and distressed, and in her distress she had accepted without surprise Thresk's introduction to her as a stranger.
But Thresk's eyes were keen. The space between the despatch-box and the wall was empty. Nothing crawled there, nothing was coiled. Thresk looked at Ballantyne with amazement; and as he looked Ballantyne sprang from his chair with a scream of terror the scream of a panic-stricken child. He sprang with an agility which Thresk would never have believed possible in a man of so gross a build.
Baram Singh replied that he had brought an ash-tray for the Sahib, and he placed it on the round table by Thresk's side. "Well, get out and don't come back until you are called," cried Ballantyne roughly, and in evident relief as Baram Singh once more retired he took a long draught from a fresh tumbler of whisky-and-soda which stood on the flap of the bureau beside him.
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