* * * * *

Mrs. Repton had begun to tell her story with reluctance, dreading lest Thresk should attribute it to a woman’s nerves and laugh.  But he did not.  He listened gravely, seriously; and, as she continued, that nightmare of an evening so lived again in her recollections that she could not but make it vivid in her words.

“I had more than a mere sense of danger,” she said.  “I felt besides a sort of hideous discomfort, almost physical discomfort, which made me believe that there was something evil in that room beyond the power of language to describe.”

She felt her self-control leaving her.  If she stayed she must betray her alarm.  Even now she had swallowed again and again, and she wondered that he had not detected the working of her throat.  She summoned what was left of her courage and tossing her book aside rose slowly and deliberately.

“I think I shall copy Stella’s example and lie down for an hour,” she said without turning her head towards Ballantyne, and even while she spoke she knew that she had made a mistake in mentioning Stella.  He would follow her to discover whether she went to Stella’s room and told what she had seen to her.  But he did not move.  She reached the door, turned the handle, went out and closed the door behind her.

For a moment then her strength failed her; she leaned against the wall by the side of the door, her heart racing.  But the fear that he would follow urged her on.  She crossed the hall and stopped deliberately before a cabinet of china at the foot of the stairs, which stood against the wall in which the library door was placed.  While she stood there she saw the door open very slowly and Ballantyne’s livid face appear at the opening.  She turned towards the stairs and mounted them without looking back.  Halfway up a turn hid the hall from her, and the moment after she had passed the turn she heard him crossing the hall after her, again with a lightness of step which seemed to be uncanny and inhuman in so heavy and gross a creature.

“I was appalled,” she said to Thresk frankly.  “He had the step of an animal.  I felt that some great baboon was tracking me stealthily.”

Mrs. Repton came to Stella Ballantyne’s door and was careful not to stop.  She reached her own room, and once in shot the bolt; and in a moment or two she heard him breathing just outside the panels.

“And to think that Stella is alone with him in the jungle months at a time!” she cried, actually wringing her hands.  “That thought was in my mind all the time—­a horror of a thought.  Oh, I could understand now the loss of her spirits, her colour, her youth.”

Pictures of lonely camps and empty rest-houses, far removed from any habitation in the silence of Indian nights, rose before her eyes.  She imagined Stella propped up on her elbow in bed, wide-eyed with terror, listening and listening to the light footsteps of the drunken brute beyond the partition-wall, shivering when they approached, dropping back with the dew of her sweat upon her forehead when they retired; and these pictures she translated in words for Thresk in her house on the Khamballa Hill.