d not question the accuracy of
his message. He told me to tell Trench. I did not. I thought the matter
over with the telegram in front of me. Castleton was leaving that night
for Scotland, and he would go straight from Scotland to rejoin the
regiment. He would not, therefore, see Trench for some weeks at the
earliest, and by that time the telegram would very likely be forgotten
or its date confused. I did not tell Trench. I threw the telegram into
the fire, and that night sent in my papers. But Trench found out
somehow. Durrance was at dinner, too,--good God, Durrance!" he suddenly
broke out. "Most likely he knows like the rest."

It came upon him as something shocking and strangely new that his friend
Durrance, who, as he knew very well, had been wont rather to look up to
him, in all likelihood counted him a thing of scorn. But he heard Ethne
speaking. After all, what did it matter whether Durrance knew, whether
every man knew, from the South Pole to the North, since she, Ethne,
knew?

"And is this all?" she asked.

"Surely it is enough," said he.

"I think not," she answered, and she lowered her voice a little as she
went on. "We agreed, didn't we, that no foolish misunderstandings should
ever come between us? We were to be frank, and to take frankness each
from the other without offence. So be frank with me! Please!" and she
pleaded. "I could, I think, claim it as a right. At all events I ask for
it as I shall never ask for anything else in all my life."

There was a sort of explanation of his act, Harry Feversham remembered;
but it was so futile when compared with the overwhelming consequence.
Ethne had unclenched her hands; the three feathers lay before his eyes
upon the table. They could not be explained away; he wore "coward" like
a blind man's label; besides, he could never make her understand.
However, she wished for the explanation and had a right to it; she had
been generous in asking for it, with a generosity not very common
amongst women. So Feversham gathered his wits and explained:--

"All my life I have been afraid that some day I should play the coward,
and from the very first I knew that I was destined for the army. I kept
my fear to myself. There was no one to whom I could tell it. My mother
was dead, and my father--" he stopped for a moment, with a deep intake
of the breath. He could see his father, that lonely iron man, sitting at
this very moment in his mother's favourite seat upon the terrac