"
She spoke without any impressive lowering of the voice, but in the
steady, level tone of one stating the simplest imaginable fact.
Feversham caught his breath like a man in pain. But the girl's eyes
were upon his face, and he sat still, staring in front of him without so
much as a contraction of the forehead. But it seemed that he could not
trust himself to answer. He kept his lips closed, and Ethne continued:--
"You see I can put up with the absence of the people I care about, a
little better perhaps than most people. I do not feel that I have lost
them at all," and she cast about for a while as if her thought was
difficult to express. "You know how things happen," she resumed. "One
goes along in a dull sort of way, and then suddenly a face springs out
from the crowd of one's acquaintances, and you know it at once and
certainly for the face of a friend, or rather you recognise it, though
you have never seen it before. It is almost as though you had come upon
some one long looked for and now gladly recovered. Well, such
friends--they are few, no doubt, but after all only the few really
count--such friends one does not lose, whether they are absent, or
even--dead.
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