“I must tell you who I am,” he said awkwardly.

“There is no need to,” she answered, “I know.”

He then cautioned her in the usual way, and producing his pocket-book asked her whether she wished to throw any light upon her husband’s death.

“No,” she said.  “I have nothing to say.  I was asleep and in bed when my ayah came into my room with the news of his death.”

“Yes,” said the Inspector uncomfortably.  That detail, next to the dragging of the body out of the tent, seemed to him the grimmest part of the whole tragedy.

He shut up his book.

“I am afraid it is all very unsatisfactory,” he said.  “I think we must go back to Bombay.”

“It is as your Excellency wills,” said Stella in Hindustani, and the Inspector was startled by the bad taste of the joke.  He had not the knowledge of her life with Ballantyne, which alone would have given him the key to understand her.  But he was not a fool, and a second glance at her showed to him that she was not speaking in joke at all.  He had an impression that she was so tired that she did not at the moment care what happened to her at all.  The fatigue would wear off, no doubt, when she realised that she must fight for her life, but now she stood in front of him indifferent and docile—­much as one of the native levies was wont to stand before her husband.  The words which the levies used and the language in which they spoke them rose naturally to her lips, as the only words and language suitable to the occasion.

“You see, Mrs. Ballantyne,” he said gently, “there is no reason to suspect a single one of your servants or of your escort.”

“And there is reason to suspect me,” she added, looking at him quietly and steadily.

The Inspector for his part looked away.  He was a young man—­no more than a year or two older than Stella Ballantyne herself.  They both came from the same kind of stock.  Her people and his people might have been friends in some pleasant country village in one of the English counties.  She was pretty, too, disconcertingly pretty, in spite of the dark circles under her eyes and the pallor of her face.  There was a delicacy in her looks and in her dress which appealed to him for tenderness.  The appeal was all the stronger because it was only in that way and unconsciously that she appealed.  In her voice, in her bearing, in her eyes there was no request, no prayer.

“I have been to the Palace,” he said, “I have had an audience with the Maharajah.”

“Of course,” she answered.  “I shall put no difficulties in your way.”