CHAPTER XXIII
Ah Wong
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.
