The Four Feathers

non House that night suspected that any swift cause of severance had come between them. Harry Feversham watched Ethne laugh and talk as though she had never a care, and was perpetuall

hed a partner without the notion that she would turn upon him with the contemptuous name which was his upon her tongue. Yet he felt no fear on that account. He would not indeed have cared had it happened, had the word been spoken. He had lost Ethne. He watched her and looked in vain amongst her guests, as indeed he surely knew he would, for a fit comparison. There were women, pretty, graceful, even beautiful, but Ethne

with Feversham, and as she looked toward the windows she saw that the daylig

d very grey. Her eyes shut tightly and then opened again. He thought that she would faint. "The morning at last!" she

nutes more-only a very few!" He stopped and sto

and the bright wheel of the danc

er endurance, from the drawn aspect of her face and the depths of pain in her eyes, how deeply he had wounded her. He no longer said, "I have lost her," he no longer thought of his loss at all. He heard her words, "I wonder whether it is right that one should suffer so much pain." He fe

re staying in the house sought the smoking-room or went upstairs to bed according to

her back to him as she lighted a candle, "I

ed his head i

wait and see

's footsteps on the floor. Dermod walked straight up to Harry Feversham, looking for once in a way what he was, a very old man, and stood there staring into Feversham's face with a muddled and bewildered expression. Twice he opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. In the end he t

andle had not helped him to any suitable expressions. He stared into the flame now instead of into Feversham's face, and for an equal len

p twice on the floor with your

he old man's forbearance was perhaps not the

singular dead white; the very lawns were dull and grey, though the dew lay upon them like a network of frost. It was a noisy world, however, for all its aspect of quiet. For the blackbirds were calling from the branches and the grass, and down beneath the overhanging trees the Lennon flowed in music between its banks. Ethne drew back from the window. She

ne slowly back to her as she looked. She determined to keep one thing which had belonged to Harry Feversham,-a small thing, a thing of no value. At first she chose a penknife, which he had once lent to her and she had forgotten to return. But the next instant sh

is letters, made a little pile of them on the hearth and set them alight. They took some while to consume, but she waited, sitting upright in her arm-chair while the flame crept from sheet to sheet, discolouring the paper, blackening t

utiously retreating; and in spite of her will, in spite of her formal disposal of the letters and the presents, she was mastered all at once, not by pain or humiliation, but by an overpowering sense of loneliness. She seemed to be seated high on an empty world of ruins. She rose quickly from her chair, and her eyes fell upon a violin case. With a sigh of relief she opene