“But I daren’t—­not yet.  I have tried to—­oh, more than once.  Believe that, Henry!  You must believe it!  But I couldn’t.  I hadn’t the courage.  You will give me a little time, won’t you?  Oh, not long.  I will tell him of my own free will—­very soon, Henry.  But not now—­not now.”

The sound of her sobbing and the sight of her distress wrung Thresk’s heart.  He lifted her from the ground and held her.

“There’s another way, Stella,” he said gently.

“Oh, I know,” she answered.  She was thinking of the little bottle with the tablets of veronal which stood by her bed, not for the first time that night.  She did not stop to consider whether Thresk, too, had that way in his mind.  It came to her so naturally; it was so easy, so simple a way.  She never thought that she misunderstood.  She had come to the end of the struggle; the battle had gone against her; she recognised it; and now, without complaint, she bowed her head for the final blow.  The inherited habit of submission taught her that the moment 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.”