hink me ridiculous, when you know"--and she began to laugh and to sob
in one breath. Stella Ballantyne had remained so sunk in apathy through
all that long trial that her friends were relieved at her outburst of
tears. Jane Repton led her upstairs and put her to bed just as if she
had been a child.

"There! You can get up for dinner if you like, Stella, or stay where you
are. And if you'll tell us what you want to do we'll make the
arrangements for you and not ask you a question."

Jane Repton kissed her and left her alone; and it was while Stella was
sleeping upstairs that Henry Thresk called at the house and was told that
there was no news for him.

"No doubt she will write to you, Mr. Thresk, if she wishes you to know
what she is doing. But I should not count upon it if I were you," said
Jane Repton, in a sweet voice and with eyes like pebbles. "She did not
mention you, I am sorry to say, when the trial was over."

She could not forgive him because of her own share in what she now called
his "treachery" towards Stella. She had no more of the logician in her
composition than Thresk had of the hero. He had committed under a great
stress of emotion and sympathy what the whole experience and method of
his life told him was one of the worst of crimes. And now that its object
was achieved, and Stella Ballantyne free, he was in the mood to see only
the harm which he had done to the majesty of the law; he was uneasy; he
was not troubled by the thought that discovery would absolutely ruin him.
That indeed did not enter into his thoughts. But he could not but make a
picture of himself in the robe of a King's Counsel, claiming sternly the
anger of the Law against some other man who should have done just what he
had done, no more and no less. And so when Mrs. Repton's door was finally
closed upon him, and no message was given to him from the woman he had
saved, he was at once human and unheroic enough to visit a little of his
resentment upon her. He had not spoken to her at all since the night at
Chitipur; he had no knowledge of the stupor and the prostration into
which, after her years of misery, she had fallen; he had no insight into
the one compelling passion which now had her, body and soul, in its grip.
He turned away from the door and went back to the Taj Mahal. 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,