just for a moment after he had spoken it. No expression upon his face showed that he had any intention in so pausing, but Ethne suspected one. He was listening, she suspected, for some movement of uneasiness, perhaps of pain, into which she might possibly be betrayed. But she made no movement. 'A sentence which Harry Feversham spoke a long while since,' he continued, 'in London just before I left London for Egypt. He was speaking of you, and he said: 'She is of her country and more of her county. I do not think she could be happy in any place which was not within reach of Donegal.' And when I remember that, it seems rather selfish that I should claim to keep you here at so much cost to you.'
'I was not thinking of that,' Ethne exclaimed, 'when I asked why we must wait. That makes me out most selfish. I was merely wondering why you preferred to wait, why you insist upon it. For, of course, although one hopes and prays with all one's soul that you will get your sight back, the fact of a cure can make no difference.'
She spoke slowly, and her voice again had a ring of pleading. This time Durrance did not confirm her words, and she repeated them with a greater emphasis, 'It can make no difference.'
Durrance started like a man roused from an abstraction.
'I beg your pardon, Ethne,' he said. 'I was thinking at the moment of Harry Feversham. There is something which I want you to tell me. You said a long time ago at Glenalla that you might one day bring yourself to tell it me, and I should rather like to know now. You see, Harry Feversham was my friend. I want you to tell me what happened that night at Lennon House to break off your engagement, to send him away an outcast.'
Ethne was silent for a while, and then she said gently: 'I would rather not. It is all over and done with. I don't want you to ask me ever.'
Durrance did not press for an answer in the slightest degree.
'Very well,' he said cheerily, 'I won't ask you. It might hurt you to answer, and I don't want, of course, to cause you pain.'
'It's not on that account that I wish to say nothing,' Ethne explained earnestly. She paused and chose her words. 'It isn't that I am afraid of any pain. But what took place, took place such a long while ago-I look upon Mr. Feversham as a man whom one has known well, and who is now dead.'
They were walking toward the wide gap in the line of trees upon the bank of the creek, and as Ethne spoke she raised her eyes from the ground. She saw that the little boat which she had noticed tacking up the creek while she hesitated upon the terrace had run its nose into the shore. The sail had been lowered, the little pole mast stuck up above the grass bank of the garden, and upon the bank itself a man was standing and staring vaguely towards the house as though not very sure of his ground.
'A stranger has landed from the creek,' she said. 'He looks as if he had lost his way. I will go on and put him right.'
She ran forward as she spoke, seizing upon that stranger's presence as a means of relief, even if the relief was only to last for a minute. Such relief might be felt, she imagined, by a witness in a court when the judge rises for his half-hour at luncheon-time. For the close of an interview with Durrance left her continually with the sense that she had just stepped down from a witness-box where she had been subjected to a cross-examination so deft that she could not quite clearly perceive its tendency, although from the beginning she suspected it.
The stranger at the same time advanced to her. He was a man of the middle size, with a short snub nose, a pair of vacuous protruding brown eyes, and a moustache of some ferocity. He lifted his hat from his head and disclosed a round forehead which was going bald.
'I have sailed down from Kingsbridge,' he said, 'but I have never been in this part of the world before. Can you tell me if this house is called The Pool?'
'Yes; you will find Mrs. Adair if you go up the steps on to the terrace,' said Ethne.
'I came to see Miss Eustace.'
Ethne turned back to him with surprise.
'I am Miss Eustace.'
The stranger contemplated her in silence.
'So I thought.'
He twirled first one moustache and then the other before he spoke again.
'I have had some trouble to find you, Miss Eustace. I went all the way to Glenalla-for nothing. Rather hard on a man whose leave is short!'
'I am very sorry,' said Ethne, with a smile; 'but why have you been put to this trouble?'
Again the stranger curled a moustache. Again his eyes dwelt vacantly upon her before he spoke.
'You have forgotten my name, no doubt, by this time.'
'I do not think that I have ever heard it,' she answered.
'Oh, yes, you have, believe me. You heard it five years ago. I am Captain Willoughby.'
Ethne drew sharply back; the bright colour paled in her cheeks; her lips set in a firm line, and her eyes grew very hard. She glowered at him silently.
Captain Willoughby was not in the least degree discomposed. He took his time to speak, and when he did it was rather with the air of a man forgiving a breach of manners, than of one making his excuses.
'I can quite understand that you do not welcome me, Miss Eustace, but none of us could foresee that you would be present when the three white feathers came into Feversham's hands.'
Ethne swept the explanation aside.
'How do you know that I was present?' she asked.
'Feversham told me.'
'You have seen him?'
The cry leaped loudly from her lips. It was just a throb of the heart made vocal. It startled Ethne as much as it surprised Captain Willoughby. She had schooled herself to omit Harry Feversham from her thoughts, and to obliterate him from her affections, and the cry showed to her how incompletely she had succeeded. Only a few minutes since she had spoken of him as one whom she looked upon as dead, and she had believed that she spoke the truth.
'You have actually seen him?' she repeated in a wondering voice. She gazed at her stolid companion with envy. 'You have spoken to him? And he to you? When?'
'A year ago, at Suakin. Else why should I be here?'
The question came as a shock to Ethne. She did not guess the correct answer; she was not, indeed, sufficiently mistress of herself to speculate upon any answer, but she dreaded it, whatever it might be.
'Yes,' she said slowly, and almost reluctantly. 'After all, why are you here?'
Willoughby took a letter-case from his breast, opened it with deliberation, and shook out from one of its pockets into the palm of his hand a tiny, soiled, white feather. He held it out to Ethne.
'I have come to give you this.'
Ethne did not take it. In fact, she positively shrank from it.
'Why?' she asked unsteadily.
'Three white feathers, three separate accusations of cowardice, were sent to Feversham by three separate men. This is actually one of those feathers which were forwarded from his lodgings to Ramelton five years ago. I am one of the three men who sent them. I have come to tell you that I withdraw my accusation. I take my feather back.'
'And you bring it to me?'
'He asked me to.'
Ethne took the feather in her palm, a thing in itself so light and fragile and yet so momentous as a symbol, and the trees and the garden began to whirl suddenly about her. She was aware that Captain Willoughby was speaking, but his voice had grown extraordinarily distant and thin; so that she was annoyed, since she wished very much to hear all that he had to say. She felt very cold, even upon that August day of sunlight. But the presence of Captain Willoughby, one of the three men whom she never would forgive, helped her to command herself. She would give no exhibition of weakness before any one of the detested three, and with an effort she recovered herself when she was on the very point of swooning.
'Come,' she said, 'I will hear your story. Your news was rather a shock to me. Even now I do not quite understand.'
She led the way from that open space to a little plot of grass above the creek. On three sides thick hedges
