stood preparing her rifle.

"Quite," she answered. "You had heard of me in Bombay and it came over
you that you would like to see how the woman you had loved looked after
all these years: whether she retained her pretty way, whether she missed
you--ah, above all, whether she missed you. You wanted to fan up into a
mild harmless flame the ashes of an old romance, warm your hands at it
for half an hour, recapture a savour of dim and pleasant memories and
then go back to your own place and your own work, untouched and unhurt."

Thresk laughed aloud with bitterness at the mistake she had made. Yet he
could not blame her. There was a certain shrewd insight which though it
had led her astray in this case might well have been true in any other
case, might well have been true of him. He remembered her disbelief in
all that he had said to her in that tent at Chitipur; and he was appalled
by the irony of things and the blind and feeble helplessness of men to
combat it.

"So that's why I came to Chitipur?" he cried.

"Yes," Stella answered without a second of hesitation. "But I couldn't be
left untouched and unhurt. You came and all that I had lost came with
you, came in a vivid rush of bright intolerable memories." She clasped
her hands over her eyes and Thresk lived over again that evening in the
tent upon the desert, but with a new understanding. His mind was
illumined. He saw the world as a prison in which each living being is
shut off from his neighbour by the impenetrable wall of an inability to
understand.

"Memories of summers here," she resumed, "of women friends, of dainty and
comfortable things, and days of great happiness when it was good--oh so
very good!--to be alive and young. And you were going back to it all,
straight by the night-mail to Bombay, straight from the station on board
your ship. Oh, how it hurt to hear you speak of it, with a casual
pleasant word about exile and next-door neighbours!" She clasped her
hands together in front of her, her fingers worked and twisted. "No, I
couldn't endure it," she whispered. "The blows, the ridicule, the
contempt, I determined, should come to an end that night, and when you
saw me with the rifle in my hand I was going to end it."

"Yes?"

"And then the stupidest thing happened. I couldn't find the little box
of cartridges."

Stella described to him how she had run hither and thither about the
tent, opening drawers, looking into bags and growing more nervous and