ered by a garden-sprinkler, and where a gardener was at work attending
to a bed of bright flowers. There, too, she had been making the usual
pathetic attempt to convert a half-acre of this country of yellow desert
into a green garden of England. Coulson had not a shadow of doubt in his
mind Stella Ballantyne would exchange this room with its restful colours
and its outlook on a green lawn for--at the best--many years of solitary
imprisonment in Poona Gaol. He shut up his book with a snap.

"Will you be ready to go in an hour?" he asked roughly.

"Yes," said she.

"If I leave you unwatched during that hour you will promise to me that
you will be ready to go in an hour?"

Stella Ballantyne nodded her head.

"I shall not kill myself now," she said, and he looked at her quickly,
but she did not trouble to explain her words. She merely added: "I may
take some clothes, I suppose?"

"Whatever you need," said the Inspector. And he took her down to Bombay.

She was formally charged next morning before the stipendiary for the
murder of her husband and remanded for a week.

She was remanded at eleven o'clock in the morning, and five minutes later
the news was ticked off on the tape at the Taj Mahal Hotel. Within
another five minutes the news was brought upstairs to Thresk. He had been
fortunate. He was in a huge hotel, where people flit through its rooms
for a day and are gone the next, and no one is concerned with the doings
of his neighbour, a place of arrival and departure like the platform of a
great railway station. There was no place in all Bombay where Thresk
could so easily pass unnoticed. And he had passed unnoticed. A single
inquiry at the office, it is true, would have revealed his presence, but
no one had inquired, since by this time he should be nearing Aden. He had
kept to his rooms during the day and had only taken the air after it was
dark. This was in the early stages of wireless telegraphy, and the
_Madras_ had no installation. It might be that inquiries would be made
for him at Aden. He could only wait with Jane Repton's words ringing in
his ears: "You cannot control the price you will have to pay."

Stella Ballantyne was brought up again in a week's time and the case then
proceeded from day to day. The character of Ballantyne was revealed, his
brutalities, his cunning. Detail by detail he was built up into a gross
sinister figure secret and violent which lived again in that crowded
court and turned the