He strolled vaguely through the deserted streets, out of which suddenly the inhabitants had sunk as water through a sieve. A housemaid's laughing challenge from a doorway to the grocer's boy rang round an empty square. A lean cat went softly along the pavement, yet one could hear the fall of her pads. Everywhere blinds were drawn behind the windows. The place was in mourning for a people that died annually, like seedling flowers. Caragh drifted from street to street, amused, philosophic, in that oblivion to his own before and after of which he was so profusely capable. When he was tired he returned to the club. Then he remembered; and, after deciding regretfully against the adequateness of a telegram, wrote four pages of penitent affection, which he hoped might read more exhilarating in Ballindra than he could pretend to find them. With their execution his consciousness quickened, and he spent a melancholy evening at the play. Two days later he was in Vienna. 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. Ethel Vernon bit her lip as her husband drew out, with huge relish, in his profuse execrable German the ambagious ignorance of the hotel staff. "Well," he laughed, as the last witness withdrew, "it seems you may expect Caragh any moment from lunch-time until this day month. If only these good people had named an hour at which he couldn't possibly turn up we should have known when to look for him." "He may come when he pleases," said his wife indifferently. "It's a way he has," remarked the other, smiling. Lady Ethel determined before his arrival to see everything in the city which Caragh might wish to show her.