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-examinatio