Ethne, knew?

"And is this all?" she asked.

"Surely it is enough," said he.

"I think not," she answered, and she lowered her voice a little as she went on. "We agreed, didn't we, that no foolish misunderstandings should ever come between us? We were to be frank, and to take frankness each from the other without offence. So be frank with me! Please!" and she pleaded. "I could, I think, claim it as a right. At all events I ask for it as I shall never ask for anything else in all my life."

There was a sort of explanation of his act, Harry Feversham remembered; but it was so futile when compared with the overwhelming consequence. Ethne had unclenched her hands; the three feathers lay before his eyes upon the table. They could not be explained away; he wore "coward" like a blind man's label; besides, he could never make her understand. However, she wished for the explanation and had a right to it; she had been generous in asking for it, with a generosity not very common amongst women. So Feversham gathered his wits and explained:—

"All my life I have been afraid that some day I should play the coward, and from the very first I knew that I was destined for the army. I kept my fear to myself. There was no one to whom I could tell it. My mother was dead, and my father—" he stopped for a moment, with a deep intake of the breath. He could see his father, that lonely iron man, sitting at this very moment in his mother's favourite seat upon the terrace, and looking over the moonlit fields toward the Sussex Downs; he could imagine him dreaming of honours and distinctions worthy of the Fevershams to be gained immediately by his son in the Egyptian campaign. Surely that old man's stern heart would break beneath this blow. The magnitude of the bad thing which he had done, the misery which it would spread, were becoming very clear to Harry Feversham. He dropped his head between his hands and groaned aloud.

"My father," he resumed, "would, nay, could, never have understood. I know him. When danger came his way, it found him ready, but he did not foresee. That was my trouble always,—I foresaw. Any peril to be encountered, any risk to be run,—I foresaw them. I foresaw something else besides. My father would talk in his matter-of-fact way of the hours of waiting before the actual commencement of a battle, after the troops had been paraded. The mere anticipation of the suspense and the strain of those hours was a torture to me. I foresaw the possibility of cowardice. Then one evening, 

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