The words had been on her lips from the beginning, but she had not uttered them lest by a miracle he should after all have some unimagined explanation which would reestablish him in her thoughts. She had given him every chance. Now, however, she struck and laid bare the worst of his disloyalty. Feversham flinched, and he did not answer but allowed his silence to consent. Ethne, however, was just; she was in a way curious too: she wished to know the very bottom of the matter before she thrust it into the back of her mind.

"But yesterday," she said, "you were going to tell me something. I stopped you to point out the letter-box," and she laughed in a queer empty way. "Was it about the feathers?"

"Yes," answered Feversham, wearily. What did these persistent questions matter, since the feathers had come, since her ring lay flickering and winking on the table? "Yes, I think what you were saying rather compelled me."

"I remember," said Ethne, interrupting him rather hastily, "about seeing much of one another—afterwards. We will not speak of such things again," and Feversham swayed upon his feet as though he would fall. "I remember, too, you said one could make mistakes. You were right; I was wrong. One can do more than seem to make them. Will you, if you please, take back your ring?"

Feversham picked up the ring and held it in the palm of his hand, standing very still. He had never cared for her so much, he had never recognised her value so thoroughly, as at this moment when he lost her. She gleamed in the quiet room, wonderful, most wonderful, from the bright flowers in her hair to the white slipper on her foot. It was incredible to him that he should ever have won her. Yet he had, and disloyally had lost her. Then her voice broke in again upon his reflections.

"These, too, are yours. Will you take them, please?"

She was pointing with her fan to the feathers upon the table. Feversham obediently reached out his hand, and then drew it back in surprise.

"There are four," he said.

Ethne did not reply, and looking at her fan Feversham understood. It was a fan of ivory and white feathers. She had broken off one of those feathers and added it on her own account to the three.

The thing which she had done was cruel, no doubt. But she wished to make an end—a complete, irrevocable end; though her voice was steady and her face, despite its pallor, calm, she was really 

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