"Here!" cried Harry Vernon, tossing his wife a telegram he had just opened, "this is meant for you. Caragh's coming on from Komarom by raft."  
"By raft?" exclaimed the lady as she caught the envelope. "What's that?"
 
"One of those crawling timber things you see going by," replied Vernon, gazing meditatively across the river; "it's rather the sort of thing one imagines Caragh would do: invests him with the charm of the unexpected."
 
His wife was frowning as she read the message.
 
"What does he mean by such a piece of fooling," she said petulantly, "when he knows I'm here alone!"
 
"Never having been married, he probably thinks there's me," suggested her husband blandly.
 
"Well, there's you and about twenty ill-dressed Germans who can't even speak their own language, or no one; mostly no one. It's not amusing in a place like this. When will he be here?"
 
Harry Vernon put his finger on the bell. "We'll find out," he said.
 
But they did not. The combined intelligence of the hotel was unequal to coping with the ways of a timber raft; it made obliging guesses, tranquilly ridiculous, as a concession to good manners, which, with easy indifference to distance, endowed Caragh's new mode of motion with any rate of progress between that of a perambulator and of an express train.
 
Ethel Vernon bit her lip as her husband drew out, with huge relish, in his profuse execrable German the ambagious ignorance of the hotel staff.
 
"Well," he laughed, as the last witness withdrew, "it seems you may expect Caragh any moment from lunch-time until this day month. If only these good people had named an hour at which he couldn't possibly turn up we should have known when to look for him."
 
"He may come when he pleases," said his wife indifferently.
 
"It's a way he has," remarked the other, smiling.
 
Lady Ethel determined before his arrival to see everything in the city which Caragh might wish to show her.
 
The effort would bore her considerably, but she hoped for some compensation from his chagrin. The city was, however, for the following days, almost obliterated by pelting rain.
 
But even that brought a measure of consolation. Ethel sat at her window, and watched the green river grow turbid and swollen under the streaming skies.
 
"I hope he likes his raft," she murmured grimly.
 
But it was her husband who on that aspiration had the first news. He had paid a visit to Vacz, and meant to return by water. On the pier he found Caragh, whose curiosity in raft travel was satisfied, and who yearned for dry clothes. They travelled by the same boat, and Maurice explained that his adventure dated back many years in design, which a chance meeting with a timber merchant at Gyor enabled him to execute. He gave an account of the raft-men, their hardihood, humour, and riparian morality.
 
"I see," said Vernon, amused and interested. "Pity it's not the sort of thing that appeals to a woman!"
 
Caragh looked at him doubtfully.
 
"I suppose it's not," he said.
 
"I mean as a reason for having kept her waiting," Vernon continued.
 
"Must think of something else," soliloquized the other dolefully.
 
Vernon laughed.
 
"There's always that happy alternative for a Celt. Oh, by the way," he cried, with sudden remembrance, "how's the lady?"
 
"Which lady?" Caragh enquired.
 
"The lady you're going to marry in that green isle of yours. We heard of her from Miss Persse, who'd been staying over there, at Bally—something or other."
 
"Miss Nevern?" Caragh suggested absently, looking across the river; he was not a man very easy to surprise.
 
"That's the name!" said Vernon. "When does it come off?"
 
"I'm afraid you'll have to ask Miss Persse," replied the other slowly; "I'm not in her confidence."
 
"Well, I'm sorry," the politician said. "I hoped you were going to settle down and lead an honest life."
 
"I've kept out of prison—and Parliament, so far," replied Caragh thoughtfully.
 
"Your things turned up all right, and I took a room for them," Vernon explained, as they landed at the Ferencz Jozsef Quay and went up to the hotel. "The place is so full over this religious Bill that it's hard to get in anywhere."
 
He went up with Caragh to see if the right room had been reserved.
 
"We're dining down below at seven; everything's early here. Kapitany is coming, the leader of the opposition in the Magnates."
 
Caragh got out of his wet things in which he had lived during the two days of rain, took a bath, and dressed. There were still two hours to dinner, and he debated for a moment if he should go in search of Ethel Vernon. Something in his remembrance of her husband's smile, however, seemed to deprecate hurry, and he was aware that the man who knew not how to wait came only to the things he had not wanted.
 
As he doubted what to do, he remembered vividly where he was. While he loitered, under an apricot twilight the Váczi-utcza was becoming silvered with its thousand lamps.
 
At that hour the brilliant merry little street would be filling, between its walls of blazing windows, across the breadth of its asphalte road, with a stream of men and women; men of fine carriage and women with splendid eyes; laughing, chattering, flaunting, flirting, strolling idly to and fro.
 
He would sit there again, as he had sat so often, to sip his coffee and watch the crowd.
 
On his way a postman, running into him, gave a fresh jolt to his memory.
 
There would be a letter awaiting him from Lettice! He paused a moment, mentally to locate the post-office, and to taste the curious sedate pleasure the anticipation brought. It was the first letter he had received from her, and the first of such a kind that had ever come to him from any woman. He found it in the big busy building behind the Laktanya, and, slipping it into his pocket, turned back to the gay Váczi-utcza, already filled with a piercing ineffectual whiteness under the clear rose and amethyst of the evening sky.
 
There, with a green tumbler before him, in a kavehaz much patronized of the garrison, he sat and read his letter, looking out absently between its sentences at the lighted faces in the street.
 
It was a shy sweet formal little note, not lavish of endearment, less so even than her lips had been, and with something evasive and unaccustomed about it which touched Caragh, like the shrinking of a child's hand from an unfamiliar texture.
 
He had completely forgotten her existence half an hour earlier, yet he was surprised to find how tenderly he thought of her, when he thought of her at all. Women, before now, had often filled his thoughts to an aching tension; he had read their letters with a leaping pulse; but he had felt for none of them as he did for this frank girl, who escaped so easily from his remembrance and had never warmed his blood.
 
He bought a basket of saffron roses on his way back and sent it up to Ethel Vernon. She was sitting at table when he came down to dinner, talking volubly across it to a ruddy white-haired old gentleman with a soldier's face and shoulders. She greeted him with charming animation, introduced him to Kapitany, mentioned his adventure, and wove his tongue at once into their talk. Fine manners and the tact of entertainment were traditions in her family since there had been an earldom of Dalguise, and the famous Hungarian, noting the adroitness with which she piloted Caragh's ethical opinions into the traffic of politics, thought her a very clever woman, and him a very fortunate young man.
 
With his own good fortune Caragh was less impressed. He had not expected that his roses would be worn, but he wished that a frock had not been selected which seemed so much to miss them.
 
He knew Ethel Vernon well enough to make out the meaning of her primrose and heliotrope, and she, alas! knew him well enough to be certain that he could not miss it. The delicacy of his perception had supplied her before with forms of punishment, which she used on him the more deliberately since no one else of her acquaintance was hurt by them at all. Her courtesy, which so appealed to Kapitany, seemed to Caragh like a frozen forceps feeling for his nerves. They were both of them beyond the use of courtesies, which may lead back along the road of friendship as far, and faster, than they have led forward. Her affability seemed that night to thrust Caragh back to the days spent in fascinated speculation on the advice in Ethel Vernon's eyes. He had taken it, or supposed he had taken it, in the end, and for nearly three years now she had stood for everything of woman's interest and adjustment in his life. That, for him, was a considerable stretch of constancy, for which however he took no credit. It was due, as he had once suggested, to her bewildering inconstancy to herself, which produced in her captive a sense of attachment to half a dozen women.
 
Her inconstancy in those three years had not, it was true, been confined altogether to herself. She had forsaken her own high places more than once or twice to follow strange gods. There were certain astounding admirations to her account for men whom Caragh found intolerable.
 
She found them so herself after a brief experience, and always returned to him more charming for her mistakes, with the wry face of a child who comes from some unprofitable misdemeanour to be scolded and consoled.
 
So, with mutual concessions and disillusionment, their alliance—never worse than indiscreet—took the shape of a serene affection. On her part somewhat appropriative, and touched perhaps on his with sentiment; yet, in the main, that rare arrangement between man and woman, a loyal and tender comradeship.
 
Caragh had, in consequence, cause to feel embarrassed by the news he carried.
 
Projects for his marriage had often made a jest between them, but neither had ever taken the idea seriously, and its development would come to her, as he knew, with all the baseness of a betrayal.
 
His sense of the cruelty of what he had to tell her endued him with a strange numbness and indifference to the fashion in which during dinner her hurt pride stabbed at him under the caresses of her manner. Beside her just resentment, this irritation because he had dared to keep her waiting seemed not to matter. He was so sorry for all she was to suffer because of him, that no lesser feeling seemed to count. He listened to Vernon's politics, to Kapitany's eulogy of fogash, but he was thinking only of what he had to say.
 
After dinner the Hungarian carried Vernon off to the club, and his hostess offered to keep Caragh until her husband's return............