see you
and Durrance and Willoughby and many men who had once been my friends,
and you were all going about the work which I was used to. You can't
think how the mere routine of a regiment to which one had become
accustomed, and which one cursed heartily enough when one had to put up
with it, appealed as something very desirable. I could so easily have
run away. I could so easily have slipped on to a boat and gone back to
Suez. And the chance for which I waited never came--for three years."

"You saw us?" said Trench. "And you gave no sign?"

"How would you have taken it if I had?" And Trench was silent. "No, I
saw you, but I was careful that you should not see me. I doubt if I
could have endured it without the recollection of that night at
Ramelton, without the feel of the fourth feather to keep the
recollection actual and recent in my thoughts. I should never have gone
down from Obak into Berber. I should certainly never have joined you in
Omdurman."

Trench turned quickly towards his companion.

"She would be glad to hear you say that," he said. "I have no doubt she
is sorry about her fourth feather, sorry as I am about the other three."

"There is no reason that she should be, or that you either should be
sorry. I don't blame you, or her," and in his turn Feversham was silent
and looked towards the river. The air was shrill with cries, the shore
was thronged with a motley of Arabs and negroes, dressed in their long
robes of blue and yellow and dirty brown; the work of unloading the
dhows went busily on; across the river and beyond its fork the palm
trees of Khartum stood up against the cloudless sky; and the sun behind
them was moving down to the west. In a few hours would come the horrors
of the House of Stone. But they were both thinking of the elms by the
Lennon River and a hall of which the door stood open to the cool night
and which echoed softly to the music of a waltz, while a girl and a man
stood with three white feathers fallen upon the floor between them; the
one man recollected, the other imagined, the picture, and to both of
them it was equally vivid. Feversham smiled at last.

"Perhaps she has now seen Willoughby; perhaps she has now taken his
feather."

Trench held out his hand to his companion.

"I will take mine back now."

Feversham shook his head.

"No, not yet," and Trench's face suddenly lighted up. A hope which had
struggled up in his hopeless breast during the three days and nights