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.