"Come and try an easier chair, won't you?" Anstice pushed forward a capacious rocking-chair and Iris took it obediently, while Anstice leaned against the table regarding her rather curiously.
"Miss Wayne." Suddenly he felt a quite overwhelming desire to admit this girl into his jealously-guarded confidence. "From something you said just now I gathered that you had been good enough to spare a thought for me now and then. Does that mean that your kindness would extend so far as to allow you to listen to a very short story in which I, unfortunately, am the principal character?"
"I am ready to listen to anything you care to tell me," she said gently; and looking into her steadfast grey eyes Anstice told himself that a man could desire no sweeter, more trustworthy confidante.
"Well"—he sighed—"here is the story. Once, in India, I found myself in a tight place, with a woman, a girl, who was almost a perfect stranger to me. We had unwittingly trespassed into a native Temple, and the penalty for such trespass was—death."
He paused a second, wondering whether she had heard Bruce Cheniston's story; but although there was deep interest there was no recognition in her quiet attention; and he hurried on.
"She—the girl—made me promise not to allow her to fall into the hands of the natives. Whether she was correct in her fears of what might happen to her I don't know; but I confess I shared them at the time. Anyhow I promised that if help did not come before dawn—we were to die at sunrise—I would shoot her with my own hand."
Again he paused; and the horror in Iris' grey eyes deepened.
"Well, help did come—ten minutes too late. I was standing with my back against the wall, the guns were levelled at my heart, when the rescuers burst into the courtyard and the natives fled. But I had shot the girl ten minutes earlier...."
Anstice's brow was wet with drops of sweat as he finished, his whole being convulsed with reminiscent agony; and he turned aside lest he should read shrinking, or worse, condemnation in the grey eyes which had never left his face.
There was a silence in which to the man who waited the whole world seemed to halt upon its axis, as though aghast at the brief recital which was almost Greek in its sense of inevitable tragedy; and for a wild, hateful moment Anstice told himself that for all her boasted comprehension Iris had not the power to understand the full force of the situation.