When she put it back again, she laid the white feather in the drawer with it and locked the two things up together.
She came back to her window.

Out upon the lawn a light breeze made the shadows from the high trees dance, the sunlight mellowed and reddened.
But Ethne was of her county, as Harry Feversham had long ago discovered, and her heart yearned for it at this moment.

It was the month of August.
The first of the heather would be out upon the hillsides of Donegal, and she wished that the good news had been brought to her there.

The regret that it had not was her crumpled rose-leaf.

Here she was in a strange land; there the brown mountains, with their outcroppings of granite and the voices of the streams, would have shared, she almost thought, in her new happiness.