I have admitted to you that I knew friendship limited
your thoughts of me. I have owned to you that there is no hope my sight
will be restored. I have even dared to-night to tell you what I have
kept secret for so long, my meeting with Harry Feversham and the peril
he has run. And why? Because for the first time I have heard to-night
just those signs for which I waited. The new softness, the new pride, in
your voice, the buoyancy in your laughter--they have been audible to me
all this evening. The restraint and the tension were gone from your
manner. And when you played, it was as though some one with just your
skill and knowledge played, but some one who let her heart speak
resonantly through the music as until to-night you have never done.
Ethne, Ethne!"
But at that moment Ethne was in the little enclosed garden whither she
had led Captain Willoughby that morning. Here she was private; her
collie dog had joined her; she had reached the solitude and the silence
which had become necessities to her. A few more words from Durrance and
her prudence would have broken beneath the strain. All that pretence of
affection which during these last months she had so sedulously built up
about him like a wall which he was never to look over, would have been
struck down and levelled to the ground.
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