and, besides, she was a woman of
strong faith. But she was relieved to know that the sender of the third
feather could never be approached. Moreover, she hated him, and there
was an end of the matter.

Durrance was startled. He was a soldier of a type not so rare as the
makers of war stories wish their readers to believe. Hector of Troy was
his ancestor; he was neither hysterical in his language nor vindictive
in his acts; he was not an elderly schoolboy with a taste for loud talk,
but a quiet man who did his work without noise, who could be stern when
occasion needed and of an unflinching severity, but whose nature was
gentle and compassionate. And this barbaric utterance of Ethne Eustace
he did not understand.

"You disliked Major Castleton so much?" he exclaimed.

"I never knew him."

"Yet you are glad that he is dead?"

"I am quite glad," said Ethne, stubbornly.

She made another slip when she spoke thus of Major Castleton, and
Durrance did not pass it by unnoticed. He remembered it, and thought it
over in his gun-room at Guessens. It added something to the explanation
which he was building up of Harry Feversham's disgrace and
disappearance. The story was gradually becoming clear to his sharpened
wits. Captain Willoughby's visit and the token he had brought had given
him the clue. A white feather could mean nothing but an accusation of
cowardice. Durrance could not remember that he had ever detected any
signs of cowardice in Harry Feversham, and the charge startled him
perpetually into incredulity.

But the fact remained. Something had happened on the night of the ball
at Lennon House, and from that date Harry had been an outcast. Suppose
that a white feather had been forwarded to Lennon House, and had been
opened in Ethne's presence? Or more than one white feather? Ethne had
come back from her long talk with Willoughby holding that white feather
as though there was nothing so precious in all the world.

So much Mrs. Adair had told him.

It followed, then, that the cowardice was atoned, or in one particular
atoned. Ethne's recapture of her youth pointed inevitably to that
conclusion. She treasured the feather because it was no longer a symbol
of cowardice but a symbol of cowardice atoned.

But Harry Feversham had not returned, he still slunk in the world's
by-ways. Willoughby, then, was not the only man who had brought the
accusation; there were others--two others. One of the two Durrance had
long since