The Four Feathers

Excerpt: ...graced her cheeks. She was more than ever certain that Captain Willoughby had brought stirring news; she was more than ever tortured by her vain efforts to guess its nature. But Mrs. Adair, in spite of her perplexities, took her share in the talk, and that dinner passed with a freedom from embarrassment unknown since Durrance had come home to Guessens. For he, too, threw off a burden of restraint; his spirits rose to match Ethne's; he answered laugh with laugh, and from his face that habitual look of tension, the look of a man listening with all his might that his ears might make good the loss of his eyes, passed altogether away. "You will play on your violin to-night, I think," he said with a smile, as they rose from the table. "Yes," she answered, "I will-with all my heart." Durrance laughed and held open the door. The violin had remained locked in its case during these last two months. Durrance had come to look upon that violin as a gauge and test. If the world was going well with Ethne, the case was unlocked, the instrument was allowed to speak; if the world went ill, it was kept silent lest it should say too much, and open old wounds and lay them bare to other eyes. Ethne herself knew it for an indiscreet friend. But it was to be brought out to-night. Mrs. Adair lingered until Ethne was out of ear-shot. "You have noticed the change in her to-night?" she said. "Yes. Have I not?" answered Durrance. "One has waited for it, hoped for it, despaired of it." "Are you so glad of the change?" Durrance threw back his head. "Do you wonder that I am glad? Kind, friendly, unselfish-these things she has always been. But there is more than friendliness evident to-night, and for the first time it's evident." There came a look of pity upon Mrs. Adair's face, and she passed out of the room without another word. Durrance took all of that great change in Ethne to himself. Mrs. Adair drew up the blinds of the drawing-room, opened the window, and let...