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Updated: May 27, 2025
So long as Durrance had had Ethne's face with its bright colour and her steady, frank, grey eyes visible before him, he could hardly weigh her intervals of silence and her movements against her spoken words with the detachment which was now possible to him.
Even now, at that very hour perhaps, on this night of summer but she dared not let her thoughts wander that way.... The lapping of the tide against the banks was like the music of a river. It brought to Ethne's mind one particular river which had sung and babbled in her ears when five years ago she had watched out another summer night till dawn.
For he, too, threw off a burden of restraint; his spirits rose to match Ethne's; he answered laugh with laugh, and from his face that habitual look of tension, the look of a man listening with all his might that his ears might make good the loss of his eyes, passed altogether away. "You will play on your violin to-night, I think," he said with a smile, as they rose from the table.
The question pressed upon Mrs. Adair. She longed for an answer, and of course for that particular answer which would convict Ethne Eustace of duplicity. Her interest grew into an excitement when she saw Durrance, tired of waiting, follow upon Ethne's steps. But what came after was to interest her still more.
Ethne did not answer him, and they walked together out of the enclosure towards the spot where Willoughby had moored his boat. She hurried him down the bank to the water's edge, intent that he should sail away unperceived. But Ethne had counted without Mrs. Adair, who all that morning had seen much in Ethne's movements to interest her.
"It is hot in here," he said. "Do you mind?" and without waiting for an answer he loosed the catch and raised the sash. For some little while he stood by the open window, silent, undecided. Durrance plainly did not know of the fourth feather broken off from Ethne's fan, he had not heard the conversation between himself and Feversham in the grill-room of the Criterion Restaurant.
Or more than one white feather? Ethne had come back from her long talk with Willoughby holding that white feather as though there was nothing so precious in all the world. So much Mrs. Adair had told him. It followed, then, that the cowardice was atoned, or in one particular atoned. Ethne's recapture of her youth pointed inevitably to that conclusion.
Durrance could not remember that he had ever detected any signs of cowardice in Harry Feversham, and the charge startled him perpetually into incredulity. But the fact remained. Something had happened on the night of the ball at Lennon House, and from that date Harry had been an outcast. Suppose that a white feather had been forwarded to Lennon House, and had been opened in Ethne's presence?
He was beginning to speculate whether after all he had been right in his inference from Ethne's recapture of her youth to-night, whether the shadow of Feversham did not after all fall between them. He leaned farther forward, feeling with his hand, and suddenly a string of Ethne's violin twanged loud. She had left it lying on the chair, and his fingers had touched it.
A chill, sinister feeling crept over me, but I kept my gaze fixed steadily in the same direction. The next minute the lights went up, and I found myself staring straight at Sir Alister Moeran. His arm was round Ethne's waist and she was smiling up into his face. Almost immediately they took up the dance again, and I and my partner followed suit. But all my gaiety had departed.
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