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 CHAPTER XXIII

That same night, at midnight, Tom Carruthers and Hilda Gregory sat hand in hand on a verandah that looked down the Peak on to the city and the water beyond. The midnight sky was thick with stars, and up and down the Peak's town-side thin snakes of light crept now and then—the lantern lights of late-sojourning natives, or of those pulling and pushing the rickshaws, and carrying the chairs of European merry-makers returning to the Peak to sleep in its comparative cool—a party that had dined at Government House, a dozen who had made moonlight picnic in the grounds of Douglas' Folly or at Wong-ma-kok, a man who had worked late at the bank, three who had played late at the club, several who had been at a dance, and perhaps fifty who had been yawning over the Richelieu of a very scratch Australian company. In Hong Kong—the town itself—the lights were still many, for Hong Kong both works and revels late o' nights, and on the nearer water dimmer lights blinked sleepily. And from the mastheads of many a ship larger lights hung bright and clear—red, green, blue, orange. There were half a dozen that Carruthers could identify as theirs—lanterns slung from craft of the Gregory Steamship Company—and he pointed them out to Hilda.

They spoke to each other but fitfully. Each was trying to think of some worth-while suggestion to make about poor Basil, and neither could.