She talked with her visitor as though no unusual thing had happened an hour before, she even talked of their marriage and the rebuilding of Lennon House. It was difficult, but she had grown used to difficulties. Only that night Durrance made her path a little harder to tread. He asked her, after the maid had brought in the tea, to play to him the “Melusine Overture” upon her violin.
“Not tonight,” said Ethne. “I am rather tired.” And she had hardly spoken before she changed her mind. Ethne was determined that in the small things as well as in the great she must not shirk. The small things with their daily happenings were just those about which she must be most careful. “Still I think that I can play the overture,” she said with a smile, and she took down her violin. She played the overture through from the beginning to the end. Durrance stood at the window with his back towards her until she had ended. Then he walked to her side.
“I was rather a brute,” he said quietly, “to ask you to play that overture tonight.”
“I wasn’t anxious to play,” she answered as she laid the violin aside.
“I know. But I was anxious to find out something, and I knew no other way of finding it out.”
Ethne turned up to him a startled face.
“What do you mean?” she asked in a voice of suspense.
“You are so seldom off your guard. Only indeed at rare times when you play. Once before when you played that overture you were off your guard. I thought that if I could get you to play it again tonight—the overture which was once strummed out in a dingy café at Wadi Halfa—tonight again I should find you off your guard.”
His words took her breath away and the colour from her cheeks. She got up slowly from her chair and stared at him wide-eyed. He could not know. It was impossible. He did not know.
But Durrance went quietly on.
“Well? Did you take back your feather? The fourth one?”
These to Ethne were the incredible words. Durrance spoke them with a smile upon his face. It took her a long time to understand that he had actually spoken them. She was not sure at the first that her overstrained senses were not playing her tricks; but he repeated his question, and she could no longer disbelieve or misunderstand.
“Who told you of any fourth feather?” she asked.
“Trench,” he answered. “I met him at Dover. But he only told me of the fourth feather,” said Durrance. “I knew of the three before. Trench would never have told me of the fourth had I not known of the three. For I should not have met him as he landed from the steamer at Dover. I should not have asked him, ‘Where is Harry Feversham?’ And for me to know of the three was enough.”
“How do you know?” she cried in a kind of despair, and coming close to her he took gently hold of her arm.
“But since I know,” he protested, “what does it matter how I know? I have known a long while, ever since Captain Willoughby came to The Pool with the first feather. I waited to tell you that I knew until Harry Feversham came back, and he came today.”
Ethne sat down in her chair again. She was stunned by Durrance’s unexpected disclosure. She had so carefully guarded her secret, that to realise that for a year it had been no secret came as a shock to her. But, even in the midst of her confusion, she understood that she must have time to gather up her faculties again under command. So she spoke of the unimportant thing to gain the time.
“You were in the church, then? Or you heard us upon the steps? Or you met—him as he rode away?”
“Not one of the conjectures is right,” said Durrance, with a smile. Ethne had hit upon the right subject to delay the statement of the decision to which she knew very well that he had come. Durrance had his vanities like others; and in particular one vanity which had sprung up within him since he had become blind. He prided himself upon the quickness of his perception. It was a delight to him to make discoveries which no one expected a man who had lost his sight to make, and to announce them unexpectedly. It was an additional pleasure to relate to his puzzled audience the steps by which he had reached his discovery. “Not one of your conjectures is right, Ethne,” he said, and he practically asked her to question him.
“Then how did you find out?” she asked.
“I knew from Trench that Harry Feversham would come some day, and soon. I passed the church this afternoon. Your collie dog barked at me. So I knew you were inside. But a saddled horse was tied up beside the gate. So someone else was with you, and not anyone from the village. Then I got you to play, and that told me who it was who rode the horse.”
“Yes,” said Ethne, vaguely. She had barely listened to his words. “Yes, I see.” Then in a definite voice, which showed that she had regained all her self-control, she said:—
“You went away to Wiesbaden for a year. You went away just after Captain Willoughby came. Was that the reason why you went away?”
“I went because neither you nor I could have kept up the game of pretences we were playing. You were pretending that you had no thought for Harry Feversham, that you hardly cared whether he was alive or dead. I was pretending not to have found out that beyond everything in the world you cared for him. Some day or
