"There is no reason that she should be, or that you either should be sorry. I don't blame you, or her," and in his turn Feversham was silent and looked towards the river. The air was shrill with cries, the shore was thronged with a motley of Arabs and negroes, dressed in their long robes of blue and yellow and dirty brown; the work of unloading the dhows went busily on; across the river and beyond its fork the palm trees of Khartum stood up against the cloudless sky; and the sun behind them was moving down to the west. In a few hours would come the horrors of the House of Stone. But they were both thinking of the elms by the Lennon River and a hall of which the door stood open to the cool night and which echoed softly to the music of a waltz, while a girl and a man stood with three white feathers fallen upon the floor between them; the one man recollected, the other imagined, the picture, and to both of them it was equally vivid. Feversham smiled at last.
"Perhaps she has now seen Willoughby; perhaps she has now taken his feather."
Trench held out his hand to his companion.
"I will take mine back now."
Feversham shook his head.
"No, not yet," and Trench's face suddenly lighted up. A hope which had struggled up in his hopeless breast during the three days and nights of his watch, a hope which he had striven to repress for very fear lest it might prove false, sprang to life.
"Not yet,—then you have a plan for our escape," and the anxiety returned to Feversham's face.
"I said nothing of it," he pleaded, "tell me that! When I was delirious in the prison there, I said nothing of it, I breathed no word of it? I told you of the four feathers, I told you of Ethne, but of the plan for your escape I said nothing."
"Not a single word. So that I myself was in doubt, and did not dare to believe," and Feversham's anxiety died away. He had spoken with his hand trembling upon Trench's arm, and his voice itself had trembled with alarm.
"You see if I spoke of that in the House of Stone," he exclaimed, "I might have spoken of it in Dongola. For in Dongola as well as in Omdurman I was delirious. But I didn't, you say—not here, at all events. So perhaps not there either. I was afraid that I should—how I was afraid! There was a woman in Dongola who spoke some English—very little, but enough. She had been in the 'Kauneesa' of Khartum when Gordon ruled there. She was sent to question me. I had unhappy times in Dongola."