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Updated: May 27, 2025
"Have I no reason to distrust you? Why did you tell me of Captain Willoughby's coming? Why did you interfere?" "I thought you ought to know." "But Ethne wished the secret kept. I am glad to know, very glad. But, after all, you told me, and you were Ethne's friend." "Yours, too, I hope," Mrs. Adair answered, and she exclaimed: "How could I go on keeping silence? Don't you understand?" "No."
To Durrance it seemed that in all his experience nothing so horrible had ever occurred as this outburst by the woman who was Ethne's friend, nothing so unforeseen. "Ethne wrote to you at Wadi Halfa out of pity," she went on, "that was all. She wrote out of pity; and, having written, she was afraid of what she had done; and being afraid, she had not courage to tell you she was afraid.
It did not seem fair to him that another should know of it. So I rode on and kept silence." Ethne nodded her head. She could not but approve, however poignant her regret for the lost news. "So you never saw Mr. Feversham again?" "I was away nine weeks. I came back blind," he answered simply, and the very simplicity of his words went to Ethne's heart.
It was quite intelligible to him why she had betrayed Ethne's secret that night upon the terrace, and he could not but be gentle with her. "I am very sorry, Mrs. Adair," he repeated lamely. There was nothing more which he could find to say, and he held out his hand to her. "Good-bye," she said, and Durrance climbed over the stile and crossed the fields to his house. Mrs.
He saw that Ethne's remorse by implication condemned himself, and that he was not prepared to suffer. "Yes, but these fine distinctions are a little too elusive for practical purposes," he said. "You can't run the world on fine distinctions; so I cannot bring myself to believe that we three men were at all to blame, and if we were not, you of all people can have no reason for self-reproach."
He knew quite well what comfort the dog would be to Ethne in this bad hour, and perhaps he rather envied the dog. Mrs. Adair wondered that at a moment of such distress to him he could still spare a thought for so small an alleviation of Ethne's trouble. She watched him cross the garden to the stile in the hedge. He walked steadily forward upon the path like a man who sees.
"Well, Maurice," Uncle Bob said, when on the following evening I was sitting in his study having my usual before-dinner chat with him, "and how do you like Ethne's future husband?" I hesitated. "I I really don't know," I replied. "Come, boy," he said, with his whimsical smile, "why not be frank and own to a very natural jealousy?"
Feversham's disgrace and ruin, Ethne's years of unhappiness, the wearying pretences of the last few months, all had their origin years ago when Mrs. Adair, to keep Durrance to herself, threw Feversham and Ethne into each other's company. "I succeeded," continued Mrs. Adair. "You told me that I had succeeded one morning in the Row. How glad I was! You did not notice it, I am sure.
He dropped upon the ground and, drawing his coat over his head, lay, a brown spot indistinguishable from the sand about him, an irregularity in the great waste surface of earth. He shut the prospect from his eyes, and over the thousands of miles of continent and sea he drew Ethne's face towards him. A little while and he was back again in Donegal.
The smile faded from Ethne's face, but she looked again at the white feather lying in her palm, and she laughed with a great contentment. It was yellow with the desert dust. It was a proof that in this story there was to be no word of failure. "Go on," she said. Willoughby related the despatch of the negro with the donkey to Abou Fatma at the Wells of Obak.
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