e, and
looking over the moonlit fields toward the Sussex Downs; he could
imagine him dreaming of honours and distinctions worthy of the
Fevershams to be gained immediately by his son in the Egyptian campaign.
Surely that old man's stern heart would break beneath this blow. The
magnitude of the bad thing which he had done, the misery which it would
spread, were becoming very clear to Harry Feversham. He dropped his head
between his hands and groaned aloud.

"My father," he resumed, "would, nay, could, never have understood. I
know him. When danger came his way, it found him ready, but he did not
foresee. That was my trouble always,--I foresaw. Any peril to be
encountered, any risk to be run,--I foresaw them. I foresaw something
else besides. My father would talk in his matter-of-fact way of the
hours of waiting before the actual commencement of a battle, after the
troops had been paraded. The mere anticipation of the suspense and the
strain of those hours was a torture to me. I foresaw the possibility of
cowardice. Then one evening, when my father had his old friends about
him on one of his Crimean nights, two dreadful stories were told--one
of an officer, the other of a surgeon, who had both shirked. I was now
confronted with the fact of cowardice. I took those stories up to bed
with me. They never left my memory; they became a part of me. I saw
myself behaving now as one, now as the other, of those two men had
behaved, perhaps in the crisis of a battle bringing ruin upon my
country, certainly dishonouring my father and all the dead men whose
portraits hung ranged in the hall. I tried to get the best of my fears.
I hunted, but with a map of the country-side in my mind. I foresaw every
hedge, every pit, every treacherous bank."

"Yet you rode straight," interrupted Ethne. "Mr. Durrance told me so."

"Did I?" said Feversham, vaguely. "Well, perhaps I did, once the hounds
were off. Durrance never knew what the moments of waiting before the
coverts were drawn meant to me! So when this telegram came, I took the
chance it seemed to offer and resigned."

He ended his explanation. He had spoken warily, having something to
conceal. However earnestly she might ask for frankness, he must at all
costs, for her sake, hide something from her. But at once she suspected
it.

"Were you afraid, too, of disgracing me? Was I in any way the cause that
you resigned?"

Feversham looked her in the eyes and lied:--

"No."

"If you ha