Feversham sat staring in front of him for a moment. Then he said, in a voice suddenly grown hoarse:—
"You need not."
"How can I help it? I blame myself the more," she continued, "because I do not see things quite like other women. For instance, supposing that you had gone to Egypt, and that the worst had happened, I should have felt very lonely, of course, all my days, but I should have known quite surely that when those days were over, you and I would see much of one another."
She spoke without any impressive lowering of the voice, but in the steady, level tone of one stating the simplest imaginable fact. Feversham caught his breath like a man in pain. But the girl's eyes were upon his face, and he sat still, staring in front of him without so much as a contraction of the forehead. But it seemed that he could not trust himself to answer. He kept his lips closed, and Ethne continued:—
"You see I can put up with the absence of the people I care about, a little better perhaps than most people. I do not feel that I have lost them at all," and she cast about for a while as if her thought was difficult to express. "You know how things happen," she resumed. "One goes along in a dull sort of way, and then suddenly a face springs out from the crowd of one's acquaintances, and you know it at once and certainly for the face of a friend, or rather you recognise it, though you have never seen it before. It is almost as though you had come upon some one long looked for and now gladly recovered. Well, such friends—they are few, no doubt, but after all only the few really count—such friends one does not lose, whether they are absent, or even—dead."
"Unless," said Feversham, slowly, "one has made a mistake. Suppose the face in the crowd is a mask, what then? One may make mistakes."
Ethne shook her head decidedly.
"Of that kind, no. One may seem to have made mistakes, and perhaps for a long while. But in the end one would be proved not to have made them."
And the girl's implicit faith took hold upon the man and tortured him, so that he could no longer keep silence.
"Ethne," he cried, "you don't know—" But at that moment Ethne reined in her horse, laughed, and pointed with her whip.