Imagine it, even here in England, on an
evening like this! Think what it would be on an August night in the
Soudan! Especially if you had memories, say, of a place like this, to
make the torture worse."
Ethne looked out across that cool garden. At this very moment Harry
Feversham might be struggling for breath in that dark and noisome hovel,
dry of throat and fevered with the heat, with a vision before his eyes
of the grass slopes of Ramelton and with the music of the Lennon River
liquid in his ears.
"One would pray for death," said Ethne, slowly, "unless--" She was on
the point of adding "unless one went there deliberately with a fixed
thing to do," but she cut the sentence short. Durrance carried it on:--
"Unless there was a chance of escape," he said. "And there is a
chance--if Feversham is in Omdurman."
He was afraid that he had allowed himself to say too much about the
horrors of the prison in Omdurman, and he added: "Of course, what I have
described to you is mere hearsay and not to be trusted. We have no
knowledge. Prisoners may not have such bad times as we think;" and
thereupon he let the subject drop. Nor did Ethne mention it again. It
occurred to her at times to wonder in what way Durrance had understood
her abrupt disappearance from the drawing-room on the night when he had
told her of his meeting with Harry Feversham.
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