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 the crime. Sympathy at times ran high for 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 rising of the Court, he found Thresk waiting for him.
"I wish to give evidence for Mrs. Ballantyne," said Thresk—"evidence which will acquit her."
He spoke with so much certainty that the solicitor was fairly startled.