Thresk went out of the room without a word more to either Repton or his wife.  Whatever he did now he must do by himself.  He would not be admitted into that house again.  He closed the door of the room behind him, and hardly had he closed it when he heard the snap of a switch and the line of light under the door vanished.  Once more there was darkness in the drawing-room.  Repton no doubt had returned to his wife’s side and they were huddled again side by side on the sofa.  Thresk walked down the hill with a horrible feeling of isolation and loneliness.  But he shook it off as he neared the lights of Bombay.

CHAPTER XI

THRESK INTERVENES

Thresk reached his hotel with some words ringing in his head which Jane Repton had spoken to him at Mrs. Carruthers’ dinner-party: 

“You can get any single thing in life you want if you want it enough, but you cannot control the price you will have to pay for it.  That you will only learn afterwards and gradually.”

He had got what he had wanted—­the career of distinction, and he wondered whether he was to begin now to learn its price.

He mounted to his sitting-room on the second floor, avoiding the lounge and the lift and using a small side staircase instead of the great central one.  He had passed no one on the way.  In his room he looked upon the mantelshelf and on the table.  No visitor had called on him that day; no letter awaited him.  For the first time since he had landed in India a day had passed without some resident leaving on him a card or a note of invitation.  The newspapers gave him the reason.  He was supposed to have left on the Madras for England.  To make sure he rang for his waiter; no message of any kind had come.

“Shall I ask at the office?” the waiter asked.

“By no means,” answered Thresk, and he added:  “I will have dinner served up here to-night.”

There was just a possibility, he thought, that he might after all escape this particular payment.  He took from his pocket his unposted letter to Stella Ballantyne.  There was no longer any use for it and even its existence was now dangerous to Stella.  For let it be discovered, however she might plead that she knew nothing of its contents, a motive for the death of Ballantyne might be inferred from it.  It would be a false motive, but just the sort of motive which the man in the street would immediately accept.  Thresk burnt the letter carefully in a plate and pounded up each black flake of paper until nothing was left but ashes.  Then for the moment his work was done.  He had only to wait and he did not wait long.  On the very next morning his newspaper informed him that Inspector Coulson of the Bombay Police had left for Chitipur.

The Inspector was a young man devoted to his work, but he travelled now upon a duty which he would gladly have handed to any other of his colleagues.  He had met Stella Ballantyne in Bombay upon one of her rare visits to Jane Repton.  He had sat at the same dinner-table with her, and he did not find it pleasant to reflect on the tragic destiny which she must now fulfil.  For the facts were fatal.