stop.
She reached her own room, and once in shot the bolt; and in a moment or
two she heard him breathing just outside the panels.

"And to think that Stella is alone with him in the jungle months at a
time!" she cried, actually wringing her hands. "That thought was in my
mind all the time--a horror of a thought. Oh, I could understand now the
loss of her spirits, her colour, her youth."

Pictures of lonely camps and empty rest-houses, far removed from any
habitation in the silence of Indian nights, rose before her eyes. 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.

Thresk was moved and showed that he was moved. He rose and walked to the
window, turning his back to her.

"Why did she marry him?" he exclaimed. "She was poor, but she had a
little money. Why did she marry him?" and he turned back to Mrs. Repton
for an answer.

She gave him one quick look and said:

"That is one of the things she has never told me and I didn't meet her
until after she had married him."

"And why doesn't she leave him?"

Mrs. Repton held up her hands.

"Oh, the easy questions, Mr. Thresk! How many women endure the thing that
is because it is? Even to leave your husband you want a trifle of spirit.
And what if your spirit's broken? What if you are cowed? What if you live
in terror day and night?"

"Yes. I am a fool," said Thresk, and he sat down again. "There are two
more questions I want to ask. Did you ever talk to Stella"--the Christian
name slipped naturally from him and only Jane Repton of the two remarked
that he had used it--"of that incident in the library at Agra?"

"Yes."

"And did she in consequence of what you told her give you any account of
her life with her husband?"

Mrs. Repton hesitated not because she was any longer in doubt as to
whether she would speak the whole truth or not--she had committed herself
already too far--but because the form of the question nettled her. It was
a little too forensic for her taste. She was anxious to know the man; she
could dispense with the barrister altogether.

"Yes, she did," she replied, "and don't cross-examine me, please."

"I beg your pardon," said