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Updated: June 27, 2025
"Yes, we must have a talk, mustn't we?" Durrance answered seriously. He threw off his serious air, however, and chatted with good humour about the details of his journey home. He even found a subject of amusement in his sense of helplessness during the first days of his blindness; and Ethne's apprehensions rapidly diminished.
He is not very clever; he tried to obey Ethne's command of silence, but I managed to extract the information I wanted. The rest of the story I was able to put together by myself. Ethne now and then was off her guard. You are surprised that I was clever enough to find out the truth by the exercise of my own wits?" said Durrance, with a laugh. Lieutenant Sutch jumped in his seat.
He stood and stared at the feathers until he felt a light touch upon his arm. He looked and saw Ethne's gloved hand upon his sleeve. "What does it mean?" she asked. There was some perplexity in her voice, but nothing more than perplexity. The smile upon her face and the loyal confidence in her eyes showed she had never a doubt that his first word would lift it from her. "What does it mean?"
They had come to the top of a hill a couple of miles from Ramelton. The road ran between stone walls enclosing open fields upon the left, and a wood of oaks and beeches on the right. A scarlet letter-box was built into the left-hand wall, and at that Ethne's whip was pointed. "I wanted to show you that," she interrupted. "It was there I used to post my letters to you during the anxious times."
It followed that a second feather had been sent to Ramelton, and that Trench had sent it. To-night Durrance was able to join Major Castleton to Trench and Willoughby. Ethne's satisfaction at the death of a man whom she did not know could mean but the one thing. There would be the same obligation resting upon Feversham with regard to Major Castleton if he lived.
Durrance had disappeared from it, and the great stone terrace of the house and the house itself, with its striped sunblinds, looked a place of sleep. It was getting towards one o'clock, and the very birds were quiet amongst the trees. Indeed the quietude of the garden struck upon Ethne's senses as something almost strange.
You would not have blamed her, if she had frankly admitted it; you would have remained her friend. But she had not the courage." Durrance knew that there was another explanation of Ethne's hesitations and timidities. He knew, too, that the other explanation was the true one.
The summer night whispered through the open doorway in the hall; in a room near by people danced to music. He saw the three feathers fluttering to the floor; he read the growing trouble in Ethne's face. If he could do this thing, and the still harder thing which now he knew to lie beyond, he might perhaps some day see that face cleared of its trouble.
His trophies made the room a gigantic diary; he fingered his records of good days gone by and came at last to his guns and rifles. He took them down from their racks. They were to him much what Ethne's violin was to her and had stories for his ear alone.
On the other hand, whereas before she had never been troubled by a doubt as to what he meant or wished, or intended, now she was often in the dark. Durrance's blindness, in a word, had produced an effect entirely opposite to that which might have been expected. It had reversed their positions. Mrs. Adair, however, was more interested in Ethne's unusual burst of confidence.
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