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.
"I think that I am rather like your father," she said.

"I don't understand;" and in the silence which followed upon her words Feversham heard something whirr and rattle upon the table.

He looked and saw that she had slipped her engagement ring off her finger.

It lay upon the table, the stones winking at him.
"And all this--all that you have told to me," she exclaimed suddenly, with her face very stern, "you would have hidden from me?
You would have married me and hidden it, had not these three feathers come ?" The words had been on her lips from the beginning, but she had not uttered them lest by a miracle he should after all have some unimagined explanation which would reestablish him in her thoughts.