She opened her hand and looked at the feather.

And as she looked, memories sternly repressed for so long, regrets which she had thought stifled quite out of life, longings which had grown strange, filled all her thoughts.

The Devonshire meadows were about her, the salt of the sea was in the air, but she was back again in the midst of that one season at Dublin during a spring five years ago, before the feathers came to Ramelton.
Willoughby began to tell his story, and almost at once even the memory of that season vanished.
Ethne was in the most English of counties, the county of Plymouth and Dartmouth and Brixham and the Start, where the red cliffs of its coast-line speak perpetually of dead centuries, so that one cannot put into any harbour without some thought of the Spanish Main and of the little barques and pinnaces which adventured manfully out on their long voyages with the tide.

Up this very creek the clink of the ship-builders' hammers had rung, and the soil upon its banks was vigorous with the memories of British sailors.

But Ethne had no thought for these associations.