"Yes, tempts you in to the character. Like a lamp by the window of a cosy room. Makes you want to go in, and loll in a chair, and look at the pictures--there are pictures--and feel comfortably and gratefully at home. There's a kind of beauty, you know, to which one says, 'Yes, very charming; but, for heaven's sake, let's stay outside!'" "But you didn't stay outside Miss Nevin's?" Ethel Vernon asked. "Miss Nevern's," he corrected. "No, as I've told you, I went in, and walked round, and wondered how she had kept it so unspoiled. Most girls' minds are pasted over with appalling chromos of the emotions, as painted in fiction; and there's a stale taint of some one else's experience in everything they do and say; a precocious air of having been vicariously there before. It's quite stimulating to come across a woman who is fresh to what she feels." "Like the beautiful Miss Nevern! And how did it end?" "Oh, how _does_ it end?" he said with a sigh. "We vowed the endless everythings, and kissed, and parted. And here I am in Budapest!" The lady in the chair looked up at him for some seconds with a slow smile upon her lips. "I wonder when you're going to be too old," she murmured, "to talk nonsense?" "Oh, it wasn't nonsense," he answered mournfully. She began some question as to his journey, but he checked it with a lifted finger and a sudden "Hush!" She could only hear the dull rush of the river and the waning rumble of the town. Then above these floated, blown soft and faint as a thistle-seed against their faces, a bugle note from the black Castle of Buda across the stream. A wailing cadence, twice repeated, and then the long melancholy call, with all its intricate phrases delicately clear, now that their ears were adjusted to the thread of sound, ending as it had opened with the falling cadence which left a last low mournful note upon the air. "What is it?" she enquired as the sound faded. "Last Post," he answered. "Wait!" The gurgle of the river rose again, and the feebler murmur of the streets rejoined it. Then the call came once more; came with buoyant clearness through the blue night air, straight across the water. The noises of the city seemed to cease, as though all stood listening to that fluting sweetness, and, when its last plaintive challenge died away, the slender echoes of other bugles could be heard repeating it to the distant barracks beyond the hill. 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."