Stella Ballantyne, but there were always the two grim details to keep it
in check: she had been found asleep by her ayah, quietly restfully asleep
within a few hours of Ballantyne's death; and she had, according to the
theory of the Crown, found in some violence of passion the strength to
drag the dying man from the tent and to leave him to gasp out his life
under the stars.

Thresk watched the case from his rooms at the Taj Mahal Hotel. Every fact
which was calculated to arouse sympathy for her was also helping to
condemn her. No one doubted that she had shot Stephen Ballantyne. He
deserved shooting--very well. But that did not give her the right to be
his executioner. What was her defence to be? A sudden intolerable
provocation? How would that square with the dragging of his body across
the carpet to the door? There was the fatal insuperable act.

Thresk read again and again the reports of the proceedings for a hint as
to the line of the defence. He got it the day when Repton appeared in the
witness-box on a subpoena from the Crown to bear testimony to the
violence of Stephen Ballantyne. He had seen Stella with her wrist
bruised so that in public she could not remove her gloves.

"What kind of bruises?" asked the counsel.

"Such bruises as might be made by some one twisting her arms," he
answered, and then Mr. Travers, a young barrister who was enjoying his
first leap into the public eye, rose to cross-examine.

Thresk read through that cross-examination and rose to his feet. "You
cannot control the price you will have to pay," he said to himself. That
day, when Mrs. Ballantyne's solicitor returned to his office after the