I remember very well." She laughed with
a momentary recollection of Feversham's utter inability to appreciate
any music except that which she herself evoked from her violin. "He had
no ear. You couldn't invent a discord harsh enough even to attract his
attention. He could never have remembered any melody from the Musoline
Overture."

"Yet it was Harry Feversham," he answered. "Somehow he had remembered. I
can understand it. He would have so little he cared to remember, and
that little he would have striven with all his might to bring clearly
back to mind. Somehow, too, by much practice, I suppose, he had managed
to elicit from his zither some sort of resemblance to what he
remembered. Can't you imagine him working the scrap of music out in his
brain, humming it over, whistling it uncounted times with perpetual
errors and confusions, until some fine day he got it safe and sure and
fixed it in his thoughts? I can. Can't you imagine him, then, picking it
out sedulously and laboriously on the strings? I can. Indeed, I can."

Thus Ethne got her answer, and Durrance interpreted it to her
understanding. She sat silent and very deeply moved by the story he had
told to her. It was fitting that this overture, her favourite piece of
music, should convey the message that he had not forgotten her, that in
spite of the fourth white feather he thought of her with friendship.
Harry Feversham had not striven so laboriously to learn that melody in
vain. Ethne was stirred as she had thought nothing would ever again have
the power to stir her. She wondered whether Harry, as he sat in the
little bare whitewashed cafe, and strummed out his music to the negroes
and Greeks and Arabs gathered about the window, had dreamed, as she had
done to-night, that somehow, thin and feeble as it was, some echo of the
melody might reach across the world. She knew now for very certain that,
however much she might in the future pretend to forget Harry Feversham,
it would never be more than a pretence. The vision of the lighted cafe
in the desert town would never be very far from her thoughts, but she
had no intention of relaxing on that account from her determination to
pretend to forget. The mere knowledge that she had at one time been
unjustly harsh to Harry, made her yet more resolved that Durrance should
not suffer for any fault of hers.

"I told you last year, Ethne, at Hill Street," Durrance resumed, "that I
never wished to see Feversham again. I was