He thought it over now.
"Just the sort of man," he agreed.

"But we must take that risk--if she comes." "The letter's not yet written," Mrs.Repton suggested.
"But it will be," he replied, and then he stood and confronted her.

"Do you wish me not to write it ?" She avoided his eyes, she looked upon the floor, she began more than one sentence of evasion; but in the end she took both his hands in hers and said stoutly: "No, I don't! Write! Write!" "Thank you!" He went to the door, and when he had reached it she called to him in a low voice.
"Mr.Thresk, what did you mean when you repeated and repeated if she comes ?" Thresk came slowly back into the room.
"I meant that eight years ago I gave her a very good reason why she should put no faith in me." He told her that quite frankly and simply, but he told her no more than that, and she let him go.

He went back to the great hotel on the Apollo Bund and sent off a number of cablegrams to London saying that he had missed his steamer and that the work waiting for him must go to other hands.

The letter to Stella Ballantyne he kept to the last.