Captain
Willoughby. Here was a man who so shrank from the possibilities of
battle, that he must actually send in his papers rather than confront
them; yet when he stood in dire and immediate peril he felt no fear.
Captain Willoughby might well turn to Ethne for an explanation.

There had been no mystery in it to Harry Feversham, but a great
bitterness of spirit. He had sat on the verandah at Suakin, whittling
away at the edge of Captain Willoughby's table with the very knife which
he had used in Berber to dig out the letters, and which had proved so
handy a weapon when the lantern shone out behind him--the one glimmering
point of light in that vast acreage of ruin. Harry Feversham had kept it
carefully uncleansed of blood; he had treasured it all through his
flight across the two hundred and forty odd miles of desert into Suakin;
it was, next to the white feathers, the thing which he held most
precious of his possessions, and not merely because it would serve as a
corroboration of his story to Captain Willoughby, but because the weapon
enabled him to believe and realise it himself. A brown clotted rust
dulled the whole length of the blade, and often during the first two
days and nights of his flight, when he travelled alone, hiding and
running and hiding again, with the dread of pursuit always at his heels,
he had taken the knife from his breast, and stared at it with
incredulous eyes, and clutched it close to him like a thing of comfort.
He had lost his way amongst the sandhills of Obak on the evening of the
second day, and had wandered vainly, with his small store of dates and
water exhausted, until he had stumbled and lay prone, parched and
famished and enfeebled, with the bitter knowledge that Abou Fatma and
the Wells were somewhere within a mile of the spot on which he lay. But
even at that moment of exhaustion the knife had been a talisman and a
help. He grasped the rough wooden handle, all too small for a Western
hand, and he ran his fingers over the rough rust upon the blade, and the
weapon spoke to him and bade him take heart, since once he had been put
to the test and had not failed. But long before he saw the white houses
of Suakin that feeling of elation vanished, and the knife became an
emblem of the vain tortures of his boyhood and the miserable folly which
culminated in his resignation of his commission. He understood now the
words which Lieutenant Sutch had spoken in the grill-room of the
Criterion Resta