The hall was empty, and the front door stood open to the cool of the summer night. From the ballroom came the swaying lilt of the music and the beat of the dancers’ feet. Ethne drew a breath of relief at her reprieve from her duties, and then dropping her partner’s arm, crossed to a side table.
“The post is in,” she said. “There are letters, one, two, three, for you, and a little box.”
She held the box out to him as she spoke—a little white jeweller’s cardboard box—and was at once struck by its absence of weight.
“It must be empty,” she said.
Yet it was most carefully sealed and tied. Feversham broke the seals and unfastened the string. He looked at the address. The box had been forwarded from his lodgings, and he was not familiar with the handwriting.
“There is some mistake,” he said as he shook the lid open; and then he stopped abruptly. Three white feathers fluttered out of the box, swayed and rocked for a moment in the air, and then, one after another, settled gently down upon the floor. They lay like flakes of snow upon the dark polished boards. But they were not whiter than Harry Feversham’s cheeks. He stood and stared at the feathers until he felt a light touch upon his arm. He looked and saw Ethne’s gloved hand upon his sleeve.
“What does it mean?” she asked. There was some perplexity in her voice, but nothing more than perplexity. The smile upon her face and the loyal confidence in her eyes showed she had never a doubt that his first word would lift it from her. “What does it mean?”
“That there are things which cannot be hid, I suppose,” said Feversham.
For a little while Ethne did not speak. The languorous music floated into the hall, and the trees whispered from the garden through the open door. Then she shook his arm gently, uttered a breathless little laugh, and spoke as though she were pleading with a child.
“I don’t think you understand, Harry. Here are three white feathers. They were sent to you in jest? Oh, of course in jest. But it is a cruel kind of jest—”
“They were sent in deadly earnest.”
He spoke now, looking her straight in the eyes. Ethne dropped her hand from his sleeve.
“Who sent them?” she asked.
Feversham had not given a thought to that matter. The message was all in all, the men who had sent it so unimportant. But Ethne reached out her hand and took the box from him. There were three visiting cards lying at the bottom, and she took them out and read them aloud.
“Captain Trench, Mr. Castleton, Mr. Willoughby. Do you know these men?”
“All three are officers of my old regiment.”
The girl was dazed. She knelt down upon the floor and gathered the feathers into her hand with a vague thought that merely to touch them would help her to comprehension. They lay upon the palm of her white glove, and she blew gently upon them, and they swam up into the air and hung fluttering and rocking. As they floated downward she caught them again, and so she slowly felt her way to another question.
“Were they justly sent?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Harry Feversham.
He had no thought of denial or evasion. He was only aware that the dreadful thing for so many years dreadfully anticipated had at last befallen him. He was known for a coward. The word which had long blazed upon the wall of his thoughts in letters of fire was now written large in the public places. He stood as he had once stood before the portraits of his fathers, mutely accepting condemnation. It was the girl who denied, as she still kneeled upon the floor.
“I do not believe that is true,” she said. “You could not look me in the face so steadily were it true. Your eyes would seek the floor, not mine.”
“Yet it is true.”
“Three little white feathers,” she said slowly; and then, with a sob in her throat, “This afternoon we were under the elms down by the Lennon River—do you remember, Harry?—just you and I. And then come three little white feathers; and the world’s at an end.”
“Oh, don’t!” cried Harry, and his voice broke upon the word. Up till now he had spoken with a steadiness matching the steadiness of his eyes. But these last words of hers, the picture which they evoked in his memories, the pathetic simplicity of her utterance, caught him by the heart. But Ethne seemed not to hear the appeal. She was listening with her face turned toward the ballroom. The chatter and laughter of the voices there grew louder and nearer. She understood that the music had ceased. She rose quickly to her feet, clenching the feathers in her hand, and opened a door. It was the door of her sitting room.
“Come,” she said.
Harry followed her into the room, and she closed the door, shutting out the noise.
“Now,” she said, “will you tell me, if you please, why the
