Part 18 (2/2)

”You saw your oculist yesterday?” she asked quickly, as soon as they met. ”Well, what did he say?”

Durrance shrugged his shoulders.

”That one must wait. Only time can show whether a cure is possible or not,” he answered, and Ethne bent forward a little and scrutinised his face as though she doubted that he spoke the truth.

”But must you and I wait?” she asked.

”Surely,” he returned. ”It would be wiser on all counts.” And thereupon he asked her suddenly a question of which she did not see the drift. ”It was Mrs. Adair, I imagine, who proposed this plan that I should come home to Guessens and that you should stay with her here across the fields?”

Ethne was puzzled by the question, but she answered it directly and truthfully. ”I was in great distress when I heard of your accident. I was so distressed that at the first I could not think what to do. I came to London and told Laura, since she is my friend, and this was her plan.

Of course I welcomed it with all my heart;” and the note of pleading rang in her voice. She was asking Durrance to confirm her words, and he understood that. He turned towards her with a smile.

”I know that very well, Ethne,” he said gently.

Ethne drew a breath of relief, and the anxiety pa.s.sed for a little while from her face.

”It was kind of Mrs. Adair,” he resumed, ”but it is rather hard on you, who would like to be back in your own country. I remember very well a sentence which Harry Feversham--” He spoke the name quite carelessly, but paused just for a moment after he had spoken it. No expression upon his face showed that he had any intention in so pausing, but Ethne suspected one. He was listening, she suspected, for some movement of uneasiness, perhaps of pain, into which she might possibly be betrayed.

But she made no movement. ”A sentence which Harry Feversham spoke a long while since,” he continued, ”in London just before I left London for Egypt. He was speaking of you, and he said: 'She is of her country and more of her county. I do not think she could be happy in any place which was not within reach of Donegal.' And when I remember that, it seems rather selfish that I should claim to keep you here at so much cost to you.”

”I was not thinking of that,” Ethne exclaimed, ”when I asked why we must wait. That makes me out most selfish. I was merely wondering why you preferred to wait, why you insist upon it. For, of course, although one hopes and prays with all one's soul that you will get your sight back, the fact of a cure can make no difference.”

She spoke slowly, and her voice again had a ring of pleading. This time Durrance did not confirm her words, and she repeated them with a greater emphasis, ”It can make no difference.”

Durrance started like a man roused from an abstraction.

”I beg your pardon, Ethne,” he said. ”I was thinking at the moment of Harry Feversham. There is something which I want you to tell me. You said a long time ago at Glenalla that you might one day bring yourself to tell it me, and I should rather like to know now. You see, Harry Feversham was my friend. I want you to tell me what happened that night at Lennon House to break off your engagement, to send him away an outcast.”

Ethne was silent for a while, and then she said gently: ”I would rather not. It is all over and done with. I don't want you to ask me ever.”

Durrance did not press for an answer in the slightest degree.

”Very well,” he said cheerily, ”I won't ask you. It might hurt you to answer, and I don't want, of course, to cause you pain.”

”It's not on that account that I wish to say nothing,” Ethne explained earnestly. She paused and chose her words. ”It isn't that I am afraid of any pain. But what took place, took place such a long while ago--I look upon Mr. Feversham as a man whom one has known well, and who is now dead.”

They were walking toward the wide gap in the line of trees upon the bank of the creek, and as Ethne spoke she raised her eyes from the ground.

She saw that the little boat which she had noticed tacking up the creek while she hesitated upon the terrace had run its nose into the sh.o.r.e.

The sail had been lowered, the little pole mast stuck up above the gra.s.s bank of the garden, and upon the bank itself a man was standing and staring vaguely towards the house as though not very sure of his ground.

”A stranger has landed from the creek,” she said. ”He looks as if he had lost his way. I will go on and put him right.”

She ran forward as she spoke, seizing upon that stranger's presence as a means of relief, even if the relief was only to last for a minute. Such relief might be felt, she imagined, by a witness in a court when the judge rises for his half-hour at luncheon-time. For the close of an interview with Durrance left her continually with the sense that she had just stepped down from a witness-box where she had been subjected to a cross-examination so deft that she could not quite clearly perceive its tendency, although from the beginning she suspected it.

The stranger at the same time advanced to her. He was a man of the middle size, with a short snub nose, a pair of vacuous protruding brown eyes, and a moustache of some ferocity. He lifted his hat from his head and disclosed a round forehead which was going bald.

”I have sailed down from Kingsbridge,” he said, ”but I have never been in this part of the world before. Can you tell me if this house is called The Pool?”

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