Ballantyne lifted himself out of his chair and lurched over to the sideboard.  Thresk, watching him, fell to wondering why in the world Stella had married him or he her.  He knew that a blind man may see such mysteries on any day and that a wise one will not try to explain them.  Still he wondered.  Had the man’s reputation dazzled her?—­for undoubtedly he had one; or was it that intellect which suffered an eclipse when Ballantyne went into camp with nobody to carry tales?

He was still pondering on that problem when Ballantyne swung back to the table and set himself to prove, drunk though he was, that his reputation was not ill-founded.

“I am afraid Stella’s not very well,” he said, sitting heavily down.  “But she asked me to tell you things, didn’t she?  Well, her wishes are my law.  So here goes.”

His manner altogether changed now that they were alone.  He became confidential, intimate, friendly.  He was drunk.  He was a coarse heavy-featured man with bloodshot eyes; he interrupted his conversation with uneasy glances into the corners of the tent, such glances as Thresk had noticed when he was alone with him before they sat down to dinner; but he managed none the less to talk of Rajputana with a knowledge which amazed Thresk now and would have enthralled him at another time.  A visitor may see the surface of Rajputana much as Thresk had done, may admire its marble palaces, its blue lakes and the great yellow stretches of its desert, but to know anything of the life underneath in that strange secret country is given to few even of those who for long years fly the British flag over the Agencies.  Nevertheless Ballantyne knew—­very little as he acknowledged but more than his fellows.  And groping drunkenly in his mind he drew out now this queer intrigue, now that fateful piece of history, now the story of some savage punishment wreaked behind the latticed windows, and laid them one after another before Thresk’s eyes—­his peace-offerings.  And Thresk listened.  But before his eyes stood the picture of Stella Ballantyne standing alone in the dark corridor beyond the grass-screen whispering with wild lips her wish that she was dead; and in his ears was the sound of her sobbing.  Here, it seemed, was another story to add to the annals of Rajputana.

Then Ballantyne tapped him on the arm.

“You’re not listening,” he said with a leer.  “And I’m telling you good things—­things that people don’t know and that I wouldn’t tell them—­the swine.  You’re not listening.  You’re thinking I’m a brute to my wife, eh?” And Thresk was startled by the shrewdness of his host’s guess.

“Well, I’ll tell you the truth.  I am not master of myself,” Ballantyne continued.  His voice sank and his eyes narrowed to two little bright slits.  “I am afraid.  Yes, that’s the explanation.  I am so afraid that when I am not alone I seek relief any way, any how.  I can’t help it.”  And even as he spoke his eyes opened wide and he sat staring intently at a dim corner of the tent, moving his head with little jerks from one side to the other that he might see the better.