sure, and a
garden-seat stood in the centre of the grass.

"Now," said Ethne, and she motioned to Captain Willoughby to take a seat
at her side. "You will take your time, perhaps. You will forget nothing.
Even his words, if you remember them! I shall thank you for his words."
She held that white feather clenched in her hand. Somehow Harry
Feversham had redeemed his honour, somehow she had been unjust to him;
and she was to learn how. She was in no hurry. She did not even feel one
pang of remorse that she had been unjust. Remorse, no doubt, would come
afterwards. At present the mere knowledge that she had been unjust was
too great a happiness to admit of abatement. She opened her hand and
looked at the feather. And as she looked, memories sternly repressed for
so long, regrets which she had thought stifled quite out of life,
longings which had grown strange, filled all her thoughts. The
Devonshire meadows were about her, the salt of the sea was in the air,
but she was back again in the midst of that one season at Dublin during
a spring five years ago, before the feathers came to Ramelton.

Willoughby began to tell his story, and almost at once even the memory
of that season vanished.

Ethne was in the most English of counties, the county of Plymouth and
Dartmouth and Brixham and the Start, where the red cliffs of its
coast-line speak perpetually of dead centuries, so that one cannot put
into any harbour without some thought of the Spanish Main and of the
little barques and pinnaces which adventured manfully out on their long
voyages with the tide. Up this very creek the clink of the
ship-builders' hammers had rung, and the soil upon its banks was
vigorous with the memories of British sailors. But Ethne had no thought
for these associations. The country-side was a shifting mist before her
eyes, which now and then let through a glimpse of that strange wide
country in the East, of which Durrance had so often told her. The only
trees which she saw were the stunted mimosas of the desert; the only sea
the great stretches of yellow sand; the only cliffs the sharp-peaked
pyramidal black rocks rising abruptly from its surface. It was part of
the irony of her position that she was able so much more completely to
appreciate the trials which one lover of hers had undergone through the
confidences which had been made to her by the other.

CHAPTER XV

THE STORY OF THE FIRST FEATHER

"I will not interrupt you," said Ethn