wrong. The reluctance was all
on his side and not at all on mine. For the moment that he realised he
had called out my name he tried to edge backward from me into the crowd,
he began to gabble Greek, but I caught him by the arm, and I would not
let him go. He had done you some great wrong. That I know; that I knew.
But I could not remember it then. I only remembered that years before
Harry Feversham had been my friend, my one great friend; that we had
rowed in the same college boat at Oxford, he at stroke, I at seven;
that the stripes on his jersey during three successive eights had made
my eyes dizzy during those last hundred yards of spurt past the barges.
We had bathed together in Sandford Lasher on summer afternoons. We had
had supper on Kennington Island; we had cut lectures and paddled up the
Cher to Islip. And here he was at Wadi Halfa, herding with that troupe,
an outcast, sunk to such a depth of ill-fortune that he must come to
that squalid little town and play the zither vilely before a crowd of
natives and a few Greek clerks for his night's lodging and the price of
a meal."

"No," Ethne interrupted suddenly. "It was not for that reason that he
went to Wadi Halfa."

"Why, then?" asked Durrance.

"I cannot think. But he was not in any need of money. His father had
continued his allowance, and he had accepted it."

"You are sure?"

"Quite sure. I heard it only to-day," said Ethne.

It was a slip, but Ethne for once was off her guard that night. She did
not even notice that she had made a slip. She was too engrossed in
Durrance's story. Durrance himself, however, was not less preoccupied,
and so the statement passed for the moment unobserved by either.

"So you never knew what brought Mr. Feversham to Halfa?" she asked. "Did
you not ask him? Why didn't you? Why?"

She was disappointed, and the bitterness of her disappointment gave
passion to her cry. Here was the last news of Harry Feversham, and it
was brought to her incomplete, like the half sheet of a letter. The
omission might never be repaired.

"I was a fool," said Durrance. There was almost as much regret in his
voice now as there had been in hers; and because of that regret he did
not remark the passion with which she had spoken. "I shall not easily
forgive myself. He was my friend, you see. I had him by the arm, and I
let him go. I was a fool." And he knocked upon his forehead with his
fist.

"He tried Arabic," Durrance resumed, "pleading th