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He threw a single furtive, wavering glance backwards; and Lieutenant Sutch was startled, and indeed more than startled, he was pained. For this after all was Muriel Graham's boy. The look was too familiar a one to Sutch. He had seen it on the faces of recruits during their first experience of a battle too often for him to misunderstand it.
"I will start to-morrow," he said. "Harry is still in the Soudan?" "Of course." "Why of course?" asked Sutch. "Willoughby withdrew his accusation; Castleton is dead he was killed at Tamai; and Trench I know, for I have followed all these three men's careers Trench is a prisoner in Omdurman." "So is Harry Feversham." Sutch stared at his visitor.
And that is all that he will have lost." General Feversham now took his hand away and moved in his chair. He looked quickly at Durrance; he opened his mouth to ask a question, but changed his mind. "Well," he said briskly, and as though the matter were of no particular importance, "if Sutch can manage Harry's escape from Omdurman, I see no reason, either, why he should not come home."
"And if ever you want to talk over a difficult question with an older man, I am at your service." He spoke purposely in a formal voice, lest Harry with a boy's sensitiveness should think he laughed. Harry took the card and repeated his thanks. Then he went upstairs to bed. Lieutenant Sutch waited uncomfortably in the hall until the light of the candle had diminished and disappeared.
Lieutenant Sutch promised, but with an absent face, and Feversham consequently insisted. "You will breathe no word of this to man or woman, however hard you may be pressed, except to my father under the circumstances which I have explained," said Feversham. Lieutenant Sutch promised a second time and without an instant's hesitation.
At the time when Calder, disappointed at his failure to obtain news of Feversham from the one man who possessed it, stepped into a carriage of the train at Assouan, Lieutenant Sutch was driving along a high white road of Hampshire across a common of heather and gorse; and he too was troubled on Harry Feversham's account.
But he put that question aside, classing it among the considerations which he had learnt to estimate as small and unimportant. The simple and true thing the thing of real importance emerged definite and clear: Harry Feversham was atoning for his one act of cowardice with a full and an overflowing measure of atonement. "I shall astonish old Sutch," he thought, with a chuckle.
Sutch had for many years been puzzled as to the qualities in General Feversham which had attracted Muriel Graham, a woman as remarkable for the refinement of her intellect as for the beauty of her person; and he could never find an explanation.
Harry was Muriel Feversham's boy, and Sutch just for that reason should have watched him and mothered him in his boyhood since his mother was dead, and fathered him in his youth since his father did not understand. But he had failed. He had failed in a sacred trust, and he had imagined Muriel Feversham's eyes looking at him with reproach from the barrier of the skies.
"No, it was not that exactly." "Tell me! Tell me!" He feared to miss a word. Durrance related the story of the Gordon letters, and their recovery by Feversham. It was all too short for Lieutenant Sutch. "Oh, but I am glad you came," he cried. "You understand at all events," said Durrance, "that I have not come to repeat to you the questions I asked in the courtyard of my club.
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