d she have chosen to live. He looked into her face, and saw the
marks of the years upon it. It was not that she had aged so much. Her
big grey eyes shone as clearly as before, the colour was still as bright
upon her cheeks. But there was more of character. She had suffered; she
had eaten of the tree of knowledge.

"I am sorry," he said. "I did you a great wrong six years ago, and I
need not."

She held out her hand to him.

"Will you give it me, please?"

And for a moment he did not understand.

"That fourth feather," she said.

He drew his letter-case from his coat, and shook two feathers out into
the palm of his hand. The larger one, the ostrich feather, he held out
to her. But she said:--

"Both."

There was no reason why he should keep Castleton's feather any longer.
He handed them both to her, since she asked for them, and she clasped
them, and with a smile treasured them against her breast.

"I have the four feathers now," she said.

"Yes," answered Feversham; "all four. What will you do with them?"

Ethne's smile became a laugh.

"Do with them!" she cried in scorn. "I shall do nothing with them. I
shall keep them. I am very proud to have them to keep."

She kept them, as she had once kept Harry Feversham's portrait. There
was something perhaps in Durrance's contention that women so much more
than men gather up their experiences and live upon them, looking
backwards. Feversham, at all events, would now have dropped the feathers
then and there and crushed them into the dust of the path with his heel;
they had done their work. They could no longer reproach, they were no
longer needed to encourage, they were dead things. Ethne, however, held
them tight in her hand; to her they were not dead.

"Colonel Trench was here a fortnight ago," she said. "He told me you
were bringing it back to me."

"But he did not know of the fourth feather," said Feversham. "I never
told any man that I had it."

"Yes. You told Colonel Trench on your first night in the House of Stone
at Omdurman. He told me. I no longer hate him," she added, but without a
smile and quite seriously, as though it was an important statement which
needed careful recognition.

"I am glad of that," said Feversham. "He is a great friend of mine."

Ethne was silent for a moment or two. Then she said:--

"I wonder whether you have forgotten our drive from Ramelton to our
house when I came to fetch you from the quay? We were alone in the
dog-c