But he was too calm for her, too quiet. She was in the mood to want heroics. She clamoured for protestations as a drug for her uneasy mind. And Thresk stood before her without one. She searched his face with doubtful eyes. Oh, there seemed to her no tenderness in it.
"She will need--love," said Mrs. Repton. "There--that's the word. Can you give it her?"
"If she comes to me--yes. I have wanted her for eight years," and then suddenly she got, not heroics, but a glimpse of a real passion. A spasm of pain convulsed his face. He sat down and beat with his fist upon the table. "It was horrible to me to ride away from that camp and leave her there--miles away from any friend. I would have torn her from him by force if there had been a single hope that way. But his levies would have barred the road. No, this was the only chance: to come away to Bombay, to write to her that the first day, the first night she is able to slip out and travel here she will find me waiting."
Mrs. Repton was satisfied. But while he had been speaking a new fear had entered into her.
"There's something I should have thought of," she exclaimed.
"Captain Ballantyne is not generous. He is just the sort of man not to divorce his wife."
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:
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?"
"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.