d not been engaged to me, you would still have sent in your
papers?"

"Yes."

Ethne slowly stripped a glove off her hand. Feversham turned away.

"I think that I am rather like your father," she said. "I don't
understand;" and in the silence which followed upon her words Feversham
heard something whirr and rattle upon the table. He looked and saw that
she had slipped her engagement ring off her finger. It lay upon the
table, the stones winking at him.

"And all this--all that you have told to me," she exclaimed suddenly,
with her face very stern, "you would have hidden from me? You would have
married me and hidden it, had not these three feathers come?"

The words had been on her lips from the beginning, but she had not
uttered them lest by a miracle he should after all have some unimagined
explanation which would reestablish him in her thoughts. She had given
him every chance. Now, however, she struck and laid bare the worst of
his disloyalty. Feversham flinched, and he did not answer but allowed
his silence to consent. Ethne, however, was just; she was in a way
curious too: she wished to know the very bottom of the matter before she
thrust it into the back of her mind.

"But yesterday," she said, "you were going to tell me something. I
stopped you to point out the letter-box," and she laughed in a queer
empty way. "Was it about the feathers?"

"Yes," answered Feversham, wearily. What did these persistent questions
matter, since the feathers had come, since her ring lay flickering and
winking on the table? "Yes, I think what you were saying rather
compelled me."

"I remember," said Ethne, interrupting him rather hastily, "about
seeing much of one another--afterwards. We will not speak of such things
again," and Feversham swayed upon his feet as though he would fall. "I
remember, too, you said one could make mistakes. You were right; I was
wrong. One can do more than seem to make them. Will you, if you please,
take back your ring?"

Feversham picked up the ring and held it in the palm of his hand,
standing very still. He had never cared for her so much, he had never
recognised her value so thoroughly, as at this moment when he lost her.
She gleamed in the quiet room, wonderful, most wonderful, from the
bright flowers in her hair to the white slipper on her foot. It was
incredible to him that he should ever have won her. Yet he had, and
disloyally had lost her. Then her voice broke in again upon his
reflectio