Long after the last was silent Caragh still stared out over the river at the girdle of lights along its further shore and the scattered tapers which burned beyond it up the Castle slope into the sky.
"That seems to impress you very much," said Ethel Vernon presently.
"It does impress me," he replied. "It doesn't seem to belong there."
He did not say why. It was seldom worth while to submit to a woman any sentiment that was unestablished. Convention was the passport to her understanding. But what, he wondered, had soldiers in common with that cry of the spent day? How were their blatant showy lives related to the impotent patience of its despair? It was as if some noisy roisterer had breathed a Nunc Dimittis.
But he only explained, when she pressed for his reason, that the call did not sound to him sufficiently truculent for a soldier's good-night.
He whistled its English equivalent. "That's more like it," he exclaimed. "The man who sleeps on that will sleep too deep to dream of anything but love, and blood, and beer."
They talked on under the stars till Harry Vernon stumbled out on to the balcony from the darkness of the room, and began at once an energetic account of his evening at the Casino. He never consulted the interest of his hearers, but his voluble information generally made his interest theirs. He was to inspect, on the morrow, more than most men would have cared to look at in a week, and he was certain to see it all with the weighty sense of responsibility to his country which only an under secretary can acquire. He apologized to his wife for leaving her introduction to the city with one as incompetent as Caragh to do it justice.
"He probably knows it a great deal better than you ever will," she laughed.
"He probably does," replied her husband with a grin, "but the parts he knows best he won't be able to show you."
Caragh threw a cushion at the speaker's head as he turned to say good-night to his wife.