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. VI He went downstairs, and out on to the quay, turning southward along the river towards the Fövámház. For a foreigner he knew Pest well, but his knowledge only led him now by its loneliest avenue. He stood for a long while, his back to the empty market-place--which glowed by day with the red and orange of autumn ripeness--his elbows on the broad stone embankment, gazing out across the swirling river on which the starlight slid and shivered in darting streaks of gold. He hated himself for what had taken place that evening, as he had often with equal reason hated himself before. Somehow he seemed to lack the personal seriousness which saved men from treating their own affairs with the humorous tolerance which they extended to their neighbours! Life appeared to him the same comic spectacle from whatever point one saw it. Fate was often just as funny when it killed as when it crowned you, and however intimately they might annoy him, he never could keep back a laugh at its queer ways. It was Fate's whim at present to make him look like a scoundrel by a deed that was probably as decent as any he would ever do, and the irony of his ill-luck so tickled him that, in laughing at it, he had become really abominable.