V
"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.