These four years of anticipation were as nothing, then?
He had schooled himself in the tongue, he had lived in the bazaars, to no end?
He was still the craven who had sent in his papers?
The quiet confidence with which he had revealed his plan to Lieutenant Sutch over the table in the Criterion grill-room was the mere vainglory of a man who continually deceived himself?
And Ethne ?...
He dropped upon the ground and, drawing his coat over his head, lay, a brown spot indistinguishable from the sand about him, an irregularity in the great waste surface of earth.

He shut the prospect from his eyes, and over the thousands of miles of continent and sea he drew Ethne's face towards him.

A little while and he was back again in Donegal.

The summer night whispered through the open doorway in the hall; in a room near by people danced to music.

He saw the three feathers fluttering to the floor; he read the growing trouble in Ethne's face.