"My father," he resumed, "would, nay, could, never have understood. I know him. When danger came his way, it found him ready, but he did not foresee. That was my trouble always,—I foresaw. Any peril to be encountered, any risk to be run,—I foresaw them. I foresaw something else besides. My father would talk in his matter-of-fact way of the hours of waiting before the actual commencement of a battle, after the troops had been paraded. The mere anticipation of the suspense and the strain of those hours was a torture to me. I foresaw the possibility of cowardice. Then one evening, when my father had his old friends about him on one of his Crimean nights, two dreadful stories were told—one of an officer, the other of a surgeon, who had both shirked. I was now confronted with the fact of cowardice. I took those stories up to bed with me. They never left my memory; they became a part of me. I saw myself behaving now as one, now as the other, of those two men had behaved, perhaps in the crisis of a battle bringing ruin upon my country, certainly dishonouring my father and all the dead men whose portraits hung ranged in the hall. I tried to get the best of my fears. I hunted, but with a map of the country-side in my mind. I foresaw every hedge, every pit, every treacherous bank."
"Yet you rode straight," interrupted Ethne. "Mr. Durrance told me so."
"Did I?" said Feversham, vaguely. "Well, perhaps I did, once the hounds were off. Durrance never knew what the moments of waiting before the coverts were drawn meant to me! So when this telegram came, I took the chance it seemed to offer and resigned."
He ended his explanation. He had spoken warily, having something to conceal. However earnestly she might ask for frankness, he must at all costs, for her sake, hide something from her. But at once she suspected it.
"Were you afraid, too, of disgracing me? Was I in any way the cause that you resigned?"
Feversham looked her in the eyes and lied:—
"No."
"If you had not been engaged to me, you would still have sent in your papers?"
"Yes."
Ethne slowly stripped a glove off her hand. Feversham turned away.