Thresk raised his head.  Clearly that possibility had no more occurred to him than it had to Jane Repton.  He thought it over now.

“Just the sort of man,” he agreed.  “But we must take that risk—­if she comes.”

“The letter’s not yet written,” Mrs. Repton suggested.

“But it will be,” he replied, and then he stood and confronted her.  “Do you wish me not to write it?”

She avoided his eyes, she looked upon the floor, she began more than one sentence of evasion; but in the end she took both his hands in hers and said stoutly: 

“No, I don’t!  Write!  Write!”

“Thank you!”

He went to the door, and when he had reached it she called to him in a low voice.

“Mr. Thresk, what did you mean when you repeated and repeated if she comes?”

Thresk came slowly back into the room.

“I meant that eight years ago I gave her a very good reason why she should put no faith in me.”

He told her that quite frankly and simply, but he told her no more than that, and she let him go.  He went back to the great hotel on the Apollo Bund and sent off a number of cablegrams to London saying that he had missed his steamer and that the work waiting for him must go to other hands.  The letter to Stella Ballantyne he kept to the last.  It could not reach her immediately in any case since she was in camp.  For all he knew it might be weeks before she read it; and he had need to go warily in the writing of it.  Certain words she had used to him were an encouragement; but there were others which made him doubt whether she would have any faith in him.  Every now and then there had been a savour of bitterness.  Once she had been shamed because of him, on Bignor Hill where Stane Street runs to Chichester, and a second time in front of him in the tent at Chitipur.  No, it was not an easy letter which he had to write, and he took the night and the greater part of the next day to decide upon its wording.  It could not in any case go until the night-mail.  He had finished it and directed it by six o’clock in the evening and he went down with the letter in his hand into the big lounge to post it in the box there.  But it never was posted.

Close to the foot of the staircase stood a tape machine, and as Thresk descended he heard the clicking of the instrument and saw the usual small group of visitors about it.  They were mostly Americans, and they were reading out to one another the latest prices of the stock-markets.  Some of the chatter reached to Thresk’s inattentive ears, and when he was only two steps from the floor one carelessly-spoken phrase interjected between the values of two securities brought him to a stop.  The speaker was a young man with a squarish face and thick hair parted accurately in the middle.  He was dressed in a thin grey suit and he was passing the tape between his fingers as it ran out.  The picture of him was impressed during that instant upon Thresk’s mind, so that he could never afterwards forget it.