Captain Willoughby might well turn to Ethne for an explanation.
There had been no mystery in it to Harry Feversham, but a great
bitterness of spirit. He had sat on the verandah at Suakin, whittling
away at the edge of Captain Willoughby's table with the very knife which
he had used in Berber to dig out the letters, and which had proved so
handy a weapon when the lantern shone out behind him--the one glimmering
point of light in that vast acreage of ruin. Harry Feversham had kept it
carefully uncleansed of blood; he had treasured it all through his
flight across the two hundred and forty odd miles of desert into Suakin;
it was, next to the white feathers, the thing which he held most
precious of his possessions, and not merely because it would serve as a
corroboration of his story to Captain Willoughby, but because the weapon
enabled him to believe and realise it himself. A brown clotted rust
dulled the whole length of the blade, and often during the first two
days and nights of his flight, when he travelled alone, hiding and
running and hiding again, with the dread of pursuit always at his heels,
he had taken the knife from his breast, and stared at it with
incredulous eyes, and clutched it close to him like a thing of comfort.
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