had come for
compliance and gave her the dignity of patience. "Yes, I suppose that I
must take that way," she said, and she walked towards the chair over
which she had thrown her wrap. "Good-night, Henry."

But before she had thrown the cloak about her shoulders Thresk stood
between her and the window. He took the cloak from her hands.

"There have been too many mistakes, Stella, between you and me. There
must be no more. Here are we--until to-night strangers, and because we
were strangers, and never knew it, spoiling each other's lives."

Stella looked at him in bewilderment. She had taught Thresk that night
unimagined truths about herself. She was now to learn something of the
inner secret man which the outward trappings of success concealed. He led
her to a sofa and placed her at his side.

"You have said a good many hard things to me, Stella," he said with a
smile--"most of them true, but some untrue. And the untrue things you
wouldn't have said if you had ever chanced to ask yourself one question:
why I really missed my steamer at Bombay."

Stella Ballantyne was startled. She made a guess but faltered in the
utterance of it, so ill it fitted with her estimate of him.

"You missed it on purpose?"

"Yes. I didn't come to Chitipur on any sentimental journey"; and he told
how he had seen her portrait in Jane Repton's drawing-room and learnt of
the misery of her marriage.

"I came to fetch you away."

And again Stella stared at him.

"You? You pitied me so much? Oh, Henry!"

"No. I wanted you so much. It's quite true that I sacrificed everything
for success. I don't deny that it is well worth having. But Jane Repton
said something to me in Bombay so true--you can get whatever you want if
you want it enough, but you cannot control the price you will have to
pay. I know, my dear, that I paid too big a price. I trampled down
something better worth having."

Stella rose suddenly to her feet.

"Oh, if I had known that on the night in Chitipur! What a difference it
would have made!" She turned swiftly to him. "Couldn't you have told me?"

"I hadn't a chance. I hadn't five minutes with you alone. And you
wouldn't have believed me if I had had the chance. I left my pipe behind
me in order to come back and tell you. I had only the time then to tell
you that I would write."

"Yes, yes," she answered, and again the cry burst from her: "What a
difference it would have made! Merely to have known that you really
wa