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.
He followed her upstairs to her sitting-room, and out on to a little balcony which overlooked the Danube.
The night had in it still the soft warmth of the September day, but the sky was dyed with violet, in which the stars were growing white. The river swept beneath them in a leaden humming flood, and beyond it the Castle and Hill of Buda stood black among the stars.
Ethel dropped into a low cane chair, and Caragh, seated upon the balustrade, took a long look at the darkening air before he turned and spoke to her.
He knew that an explanation was expected of him, reasonable, but not so reasonable as to evade reproaches; and an apology, not humble enough to be beneath reproof. He tendered both; and if they left his censor with quite false impressions, that, he reflected ruefully, came of the perverse requirements of a woman's mind.
Looking down at her lifted face below him, pale under the purple heaven as though penetrated by the night, and still estranged, despite his pleading, over so trumpery a cause, he wondered how much, because of her beauty, woman had lost in understanding.