urant, when citing Hamlet as his example, "The thing
which he saw, which he thought over, which he imagined in the act and in
the consequence--that he shrank from. Yet when the moment of action
comes sharp and immediate, does he fail?" And remembering the words,
Harry Feversham sat one May night, four years afterwards, in Captain
Willoughby's verandah, whittling away at the table with his knife, and
saying over and over again in a bitter savage voice: "It was an
illusion, but an illusion which has caused a great deal of suffering to
a woman I would have shielded from suffering. But I am well paid for it,
for it has wrecked my life besides."

Captain Willoughby could not understand, any more than General Feversham
could have understood, or than Ethne had. But Willoughby could at all
events remember and repeat, and Ethne had grown by five years of
unhappiness since the night when Harry Feversham, in the little room
off the hall at Lennon House, had told her of his upbringing, of the
loss of his mother, and the impassable gulf between his father and
himself, and of the fear of disgrace which had haunted his nights and
disfigured the world for him by day.

"Yes, it was an illusion," she cried. "I understand. I might have
understood a long while since, but I would not. When those feathers came
he told me why they were sent, quite simply, with his eyes on mine. When
my father knew of them, he waited quite steadily and faced my father."

There was other evidence of the like kind not within Ethne's knowledge.
Harry Feversham had journeyed down to Broad Place in Surrey and made his
confession no less unflinchingly to the old general. But Ethne knew
enough. "It was the possibility of cowardice from which he shrank, not
the possibility of hurt," she exclaimed. "If only one had been a little
older, a little less sure about things, a little less narrow! I should
have listened. I should have understood. At all events, I should not, I
think, have been cruel."

Not for the first time did remorse for that fourth feather which she had
added to the three, seize upon her. She sat now crushed by it into
silence. Captain Willoughby, however, was a stubborn man, unwilling upon
any occasion to admit an error. He saw that Ethne's remorse by
implication condemned himself, and that he was not prepared to suffer.

"Yes, but these fine distinctions are a little too elusive for practical
purposes," he said. "You can't run the world on fine disti