"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." 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.