"He had
no ear. You couldn't invent a discord harsh enough even to attract his
attention. He could never have remembered any melody from the Musoline
Overture."
"Yet it was Harry Feversham," he answered. "Somehow he had remembered. I
can understand it. He would have so little he cared to remember, and
that little he would have striven with all his might to bring clearly
back to mind. Somehow, too, by much practice, I suppose, he had managed
to elicit from his zither some sort of resemblance to what he
remembered. Can't you imagine him working the scrap of music out in his
brain, humming it over, whistling it uncounted times with perpetual
errors and confusions, until some fine day he got it safe and sure and
fixed it in his thoughts? I can. Can't you imagine him, then, picking it
out sedulously and laboriously on the strings? I can. Indeed, I can."
Thus Ethne got her answer, and Durrance interpreted it to her
understanding. She sat silent and very deeply moved by the story he had
told to her. It was fitting that this overture, her favourite piece of
music, should convey the message that he had not forgotten her, that in
spite of the fourth white feather he thought of her with friendship.
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