t likely listening to Ethne playing the violin under a
clear sky in a high garden of Donegal. But even as he was turning from
the bulwarks, there came a lull of the wind, the lights burned bright
and steady on the pier, and the face leaped from the shadows distinct in
feature and expression. Durrance leaned out over the side of the boat.

"Harry!" he shouted, at the top of a wondering voice.

But the figure beneath the lamp never stirred. The wind blew the lights
again this way and that, the paddles churned the water, the mail-boat
passed beyond the pier. It was an illusion, he repeated; it was a
coincidence. It was the face of a stranger very like to Harry
Feversham's. It could not be Feversham's, because the face which
Durrance had seen so distinctly for a moment was a haggard, wistful
face--a face stamped with an extraordinary misery; the face of a man
cast out from among his fellows.

Durrance had been very busy all that week. He had clean forgotten the
arrival of that telegram and the suspense which the long perusal of it
had caused. Moreover, his newspaper had lain unfolded in his rooms. But
his friend Harry Feversham had come to see him off.

CHAPTER IV

THE BALL AT LENNON HOUSE

Yet Feversham had travelled to Dublin by the night mail after his ride
with Durrance in the Row. He had crossed Lough Swilly on the following
fore-noon by a little cargo steamer, which once a week steamed up the
Lennon River as far as Ramelton. On the quay-side Ethne was waiting for
him in her dog-cart; she gave him the hand and the smile of a comrade.

"You are surprised to see me," said she, noting the look upon his face.

"I always am," he replied. "For always you exceed my thoughts of you;"
and the smile changed upon her face--it became something more than the
smile of a comrade.

"I shall drive slowly," she said, as soon as his traps had been packed
into the cart; "I brought no groom on purpose. There will be guests
coming to-morrow. We have only to-day."

She drove along the wide causeway by the riverside, and turned up the
steep, narrow street. Feversham sat silently by her side. It was his
first visit to Ramelton, and he gazed about him, noting the dark thicket
of tall trees which climbed on the far side of the river, the old grey
bridge, the noise of the water above it as it sang over shallows, and
the drowsy quiet of the town, with a great curiosity and almost a pride
of ownership, since it was here that Ethn