It lay upon the
table, the stones winking at him.
"And all this--all that you have told to me," she exclaimed suddenly,
with her face very stern, "you would have hidden from me? You would have
married me and hidden it, had not these three feathers come?"
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.
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