He was standing in her own drawing-room, noticing with what skill comfort had been combined with daintiness, and how she had followed the usual instinct of her kind in trying to create here in this room a piece of England.  Through the window he looked out upon a lawn which was being watered by a garden-sprinkler, and where a gardener was at work attending to a bed of bright flowers.  There, too, she had been making the usual pathetic attempt to convert a half-acre of this country of yellow desert into a green garden of England.  Coulson had not a shadow of doubt in his mind Stella Ballantyne would exchange this room with its restful colours and its outlook on a green lawn for—­at the best—­many years of solitary imprisonment in Poona Gaol.  He shut up his book with a snap.

“Will you be ready to go in an hour?” he asked roughly.

“Yes,” said she.

“If I leave you unwatched during that hour you will promise to me that you will be ready to go in an hour?”

Stella Ballantyne nodded her head.

“I shall not kill myself now,” she said, and he looked at her quickly, but she did not trouble to explain her words.  She merely added:  “I may take some clothes, I suppose?”

“Whatever you need,” said the Inspector.  And he took her down to Bombay.

She was formally charged next morning before the stipendiary for the murder of her husband and remanded for a week.

She was remanded at eleven o’clock in the morning, and five minutes later the news was ticked off on the tape at the Taj Mahal Hotel.  Within another five minutes the news was brought upstairs to Thresk.  He had been fortunate.  He was in a huge hotel, where people flit through its rooms for a day and are gone the next, and no one is concerned with the doings of his neighbour, a place of arrival and departure like the platform of a great railway station.  There was no place in all Bombay where Thresk could so easily pass unnoticed.  And he had passed unnoticed.  A single inquiry at the office, it is true, would have revealed his presence, but no one had inquired, since by this time he should be nearing Aden.  He had kept to his rooms during the day and had only taken the air after it was dark.  This was in the early stages of wireless telegraphy, and the Madras had no installation.  It might be that inquiries would be made for him at Aden.  He could only wait with Jane Repton’s words ringing in his ears:  “You cannot control the price you will have to pay.”

Stella Ballantyne was brought up again in a week’s time and the case then proceeded from day to day.  The character of Ballantyne was revealed, his brutalities, his cunning.  Detail by detail he was built up into a gross sinister figure secret and violent which lived again in that crowded court and turned the eyes of the spectators with a shiver of discomfort upon the young and quiet woman in the dock.  And in that character the prosecution found the motive of