"Not simply because you were married?"
She raised her eyes from the foolish strip of embroidery engaging her fingers.
"Stella!"
There! The fence was taken, the crash had come. Now they must both face the truth, outwardly self-controlled because—what bathos! because of the punkah coolie and the open doors. Philip cursed the fact that privacy in India was next to impossible; he saw that Stella's eyes were brimming with tears. How her hands trembled! Yet he did not dare give her comfort by taking her in his arms. As in his dream, she was far from him, inapproachable as her namesake, a star.
The silence that fell between them was tense; the swish of the punkah went steadily on, the heat grew heavier, more saturating; in the hazy sky a vulture alternately sailed and dipped, hung motionless as though suspended by an invisible wire, on the outlook for some carrion prize below.
Then Philip found himself speaking rapidly, in a low voice; his hands gripped the edge of the table so tightly that his knuckles showed white and hard through the skin. He scarcely knew what he was saying, self-mastery was gone, and in the flood of his passionate declaration Stella shivered and blanched. He saw love in her eyes, but fear also—fear and helpless despair. He paused, drew in his breath sharply, but so far he felt no penitence, no remorse for having let himself go; he was conscious only of a wild exultation, for he knew that in heart and in soul she was his. He craved to hear from her lips that she loved him; she must tell him—not with her eyes alone. That it was cruel to force the admission he did not, in his madness, consider.
"Speak to me, Stella—just say it, say it once. Tell me."
Her lips moved, he bent forward. But before he could catch the whisper she had risen abruptly, to pass with swift steps into the house. He rose in his turn to stay her flight, and was confronted on the threshold of the open doorway by Sher Singh.
Disconcerting as was the man's unexpected appearance, it was to Philip merely an accidental, if enraging, check to his intention; it accounted for Stella's sudden retreat—from where she had sat she must have caught sight of Sher Singh's approach. But relief quickly followed exasperation as he realised how narrow had been their escape from an equivocal situation, for next moment Colonel Crayfield was in the room. Sher Singh's unwelcome intrusion had, after all, been timely, and thanks to the numerous exits of an Indian habitation Stella had vanished just a second or two before the entry of her husband....