that wall until Feversham recovered them. I looked
over them and saw that they were of no value, and I asked Feversham
bluntly why he, who had not dared to accompany his regiment on active
service, had risked death and torture to get them back."

Standing upon that verandah, with the quiet pool of water in front of
him, Feversham had told his story quietly and without exaggeration. He
had related how he had fallen in with Abou Fatma at Suakin, how he had
planned the recovery of the letters, how the two men had travelled
together as far as Obak, and since Abou Fatma dared not go farther, how
he himself, driving his grey donkey, had gone on alone to Berber. He had
not even concealed that access of panic which had loosened his joints
when first he saw the low brown walls of the town and the towering date
palms behind on the bank of the Nile; which had set him running and
leaping across the empty desert in the sunlight, a marrowless thing of
fear. He made, however, one omission. He said nothing of the hours which
he had spent crouching upon the hot sand, with his coat drawn over his
head, while he drew a woman's face toward him across the continents and
seas and nerved himself to endure by the look of sorrow which it wore.

"He went down into Berber at the setting of the sun," said Captain
Willoughby, and it was all that he had to say. It was enough, however,
for Ethne Eustace. She drew a deep breath of relief, her face softened,
there came a light into her grey eyes, and a smile upon her lips.

"He went down into Berber," she repeated softly.

"And found that the old town had been destroyed by the orders of the
Emir, and that a new one was building upon its southern confines,"
continued Willoughby. "All the landmarks by which Feversham was to know
the house in which the letters were hidden had gone. The roofs had been
torn off, the houses dismantled, the front walls carried away. Narrow
alleys of crumbling fives-courts--that was how Feversham described the
place--crossing this way and that and gaping to the stars. Here and
there perhaps a broken tower rose up, the remnant of a rich man's house.
But of any sign which could tell a man where the hut of Yusef, who had
once sold rock-salt in the market-place, had stood, there was no hope in
those acres of crumbling mud. The foxes had already made their burrows
there."

The smile faded from Ethne's face, but she looked again at the white
feather lying in her palm, and she la