For instance, supposing that you had gone to Egypt, and that the worst had happened, I should have felt very lonely, of course, all my days, but I should have known quite surely that when those days were over, you and I would see much of one another." She spoke without any impressive lowering of the voice, but in the steady, level tone of one stating the simplest imaginable fact.
Feversham caught his breath like a man in pain.

But the girl's eyes were upon his face, and he sat still, staring in front of him without so much as a contraction of the forehead.

But it seemed that he could not trust himself to answer.

He kept his lips closed, and Ethne continued:-- "You see I can put up with the absence of the people I care about, a little better perhaps than most people.

I do not feel that I have lost them at all," and she cast about for a while as if her thought was difficult to express.