h argued. He remembered quite clearly Durrance
standing by a window with his back to the room. He remembered a telegram
coming which took a long while in the reading--which diffused among all
except Durrance an inexplicable suspense. He remembered, too, a man who
spoke of his betrothal and of sending in his papers. But surely this
could not be the man. Was the woman's name Ethne? A woman of
Donegal--yes; and this man had spoken of sailing out of Dublin Bay--he
had spoken, too, of a feather.

"Good God!" whispered Trench. "Was the name Ethne? Was it? Was it?"

But for a while he received no answer. He heard only talk of a
mud-walled city, and an intolerable sun burning upon a wide round of
desert, and a man who lay there all the day with his linen robe drawn
over his head, and slowly drew one face towards him across three
thousand miles, until at sunset it was near, and he took courage and
went down into the gate. And after that, four words stabbed Trench.

"Three little white feathers," were the words. Trench leaned back
against the wall. It was he who had devised that message. "Three little
white feathers," the voice repeated. "This afternoon we were under the
elms down by the Lennon River--do you remember, Harry?--just you and I.
And then came three little white feathers; and the world's at an end."

Trench had no longer any doubts. The man was quoting words, and words,
no doubt, spoken by this girl Ethne on the night when the three feathers
came. "Harry," she had said. "Do you remember, Harry?" Trench was
certain.

"Feversham!" he cried. "Feversham!" And he shook the man whom he held
in his arms and called to him again. "Under the elms by the Lennon
River--" Visions of green shade touched with gold, and of the sunlight
flickering between the leaves, caught at Trench and drew him like a
mirage in that desert of which Feversham had spoken. Feversham had been
under the elms of the Lennon River on that afternoon before the feathers
came, and he was in the House of Stone at Omdurman. But why? Trench asked
himself the question and was not spared the answer.

"Willoughby took his feather back"--and upon that Feversham broke off.
His voice rambled. He seemed to be running somewhere amid sandhills
which continually shifted and danced about him as he ran, so that he
could not tell which way he went. He was in the last stage of fatigue,
too, so that his voice in his delirium became querulous and weak. "Abou
Fatma!" he cri