Thresk looked backwards over the years of Stella Ballantyne’s unhappy life.  It came upon him with a shock that what she said was the bare truth; and remorse followed hard upon the heels of the shock.  This was her first real chance and he himself was to blame that it had come no earlier.  The first chance of a life worth the living—­it had been in his hands to give her and he had refused to give it years ago on Bignor Hill.

“It’s quite true,” he admitted.  “But I don’t ask you to give it up, Stella.”  She looked at him eagerly.  “No!  You would have understood that if you had read my letter instead of tearing it up.  I only ask you to tell your lover the truth.”

“He knows it,” she said sullenly.

“No!”

“He does!  He does!” she protested, her voice rising to a low cry.

“Hush!  You’ll be heard,” said Thresk, and she listened for a moment anxiously.  But there was no sound of any one stirring in the house.

“We are safe here,” she said.  “No one sleeps above us.  Henry, he knows the truth.”

“Would you be here now if he did?”

“I came because this afternoon you seemed to be threatening me.  I didn’t understand.  I couldn’t sleep.  I saw the light in this room.  I came to ask you what you meant—­that’s all.”

“I’ll tell you what I meant,” said Thresk, and Stella with her eyes fixed upon him sank down upon a chair.  “I left my pipe behind me in the tent on the night I dined with you.  Your lover, Stella, doesn’t know that.  I came back to fetch it.  He doesn’t know that.  You were standing by the table—­” and Stella Ballantyne broke in upon him to silence the words upon his lips.

“There was no reason why he should know,” she exclaimed.  “It had nothing to do with what happened.  We know what happened.  There was a thief”—­and Thresk turned to her then with such a look of sheer amazement upon his face that she faltered and her voice died to a murmur of words—­“a lean brown arm—­a hand delicate as a woman’s.”

“There was no thief,” he said quietly.  “There was a man delirious with drink who imagined one.  There was you with the bruises on your throat and the unutterable misery in your eyes and a little rifle in your hands.  There was no one else.”

She ceased to argue; she sat looking straight in front of her with a stubborn face and a resolution to cling at all costs to her chance of happiness.

“Come, Stella,” Thresk pleaded.  “I don’t say tell every one.  I do say tell him.  For unless you do I must.”

Stella stared at him.

“You?” she said.  “You would tell him that you came back into the tent and saw me?”

“Oh, much more—­that I lied at the trial, that the story which secured your acquittal was false, that I made it up to save you.  That I told it again this afternoon to give you a chance of slipping out from an impossible position.”

She looked at Thresk for a moment in terror.  Then her expression changed.  A wave of relief swept over her; she laughed in Thresk’s face.