She was standing by the table with a small rook-rifle in her hands.  The breech was open.  She looked down the barrel, holding up the weapon so that the light might shine into the breech.

“Yes?” she said, and with so much indifference that she did not lift her eyes from her work.  “I thought you had gone.”

“I left my pipe behind me,” said Thresk.

“There it is, on the table.”

“Thank you.”

He put it in his pocket.  Of the two he was disconcerted and at a loss, she was entirely at her ease.

CHAPTER IX

AN EPISODE IN BALLANTYNE’S LIFE

The Reptons lived upon the Khamballa Hill and the bow-window of their drawing-room looked down upon the Arabian Sea and southwards along the coast towards Malabar Point.  In this embrasure Mrs. Repton sat through a morning, denying herself to her friends.  A book lay open on her lap but her eyes were upon the sea.  A few minutes after the clock upon her mantelpiece had struck twelve she saw that for which she watched:  the bowsprit and the black bows of a big ship pushing out from under the hill and the water boiling under its stem.  The whole ship came into view with its awnings and its saffron funnels and headed to the north-west for Aden.

Jane Repton rose up from her chair and watched it go.  In the sunlight its black hull was so sharply outlined on the sea, its lines and spars were so trim that it looked a miniature ship which she could reach out her hand and snatch.  But her eyes grew dim as she watched, so that it became shapeless and blurred, and long before the liner was out of sight it was quite lost to her.

“I am foolish,” she said as she turned away, and she bit her handkerchief hard.  This was midday of the Friday and ever since that dinner-party at the Carruthers’ on the Monday night she had been alternating between wild hopes and arguments of prudence.  But until this moment of disappointment she had not realised how completely the hopes had gained the upper hand with her and how extravagantly she had built upon Thresk’s urgent questioning of her at the dinner-table.

“Very likely he never found the Ballantynes at all,” she argued.  But he might have sent her word.  All that morning she had been expecting a telephone message or a telegram or a note scribbled on board the steamer and sent up the Khamballa Hill by a messenger.  But not a token had come from him and now of the boat which was carrying him to England there was nothing left but the stain of its smoke upon the sky.

Mrs. Repton put her handkerchief in her pocket and was going about the business of her house when the butler opened the door.

“I am not in—­” Mrs. Repton began and cut short the sentence with a cry of welcome and surprise, for close upon the heels of the servant Thresk was standing.

“You!” she cried.  “Oh!”

She felt her legs weakening under her and she sat down abruptly on a chair.