and spoke as though she were pleading with a child.

"I don't think you understand, Harry. Here are three white feathers. They were sent to you in jest? Oh, of course in jest. But it is a cruel kind of jest—"

"They were sent in deadly earnest."

He spoke now, looking her straight in the eyes. Ethne dropped her hand from his sleeve.

"Who sent them?" she asked.

Feversham had not given a thought to that matter. The message was all in all, the men who had sent it so unimportant. But Ethne reached out her hand and took the box from him. There were three visiting cards lying at the bottom, and she took them out and read them aloud.

"Captain Trench, Mr. Castleton, Mr. Willoughby. Do you know these men?"

"All three are officers of my old regiment."

The girl was dazed. She knelt down upon the floor and gathered the feathers into her hand with a vague thought that merely to touch them would help her to comprehension. They lay upon the palm of her white glove, and she blew gently upon them, and they swam up into the air and hung fluttering and rocking. As they floated downward she caught them again, and so she slowly felt her way to another question.

"Were they justly sent?" she asked.

"Yes," said Harry Feversham.

He had no thought of denial or evasion. He was only aware that the dreadful thing for so many years dreadfully anticipated had at last befallen him. He was known for a coward. The word which had long blazed upon the wall of his thoughts in letters of fire was now written large in the public places. He stood as he had once stood before the portraits of his fathers, mutely accepting condemnation. It was the girl who denied, as she still kneeled upon the floor.

"I do not believe that is true," she said. "You could not look me in the face so steadily were it true. Your eyes would seek the floor, not mine."

"Yet it is true."

"Three little white feathers," she said slowly; and then, with a sob in her throat, "This afternoon we were under the elms down by the Lennon River—do you remember, 

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