"'Well, here I am,' he said, with a curious air of being surprised at
the sound of his own voice.

"The commanding officer from the other settee observed the handsome,
flushed face. Drops of fog hung on the yellow beard and moustaches of
the Northman. The much darker eyebrows ran together in a puzzled frown,
and suddenly he jumped up.

"'What I mean is that I don't know where I am. I really don't,' he
burst out, with extreme earnestness. 'Hang it all! I got turned around
somehow. The fog has been after me for a week. More than a week. And
then my engines broke down. I will tell you how it was.'

"He burst out into loquacity. It was not hurried, but it was insistent.
It was not continuous for all that. It was broken by the most queer,
thoughtful pauses. Each of these pauses lasted no more than a couple of
seconds, and each had the profoundity of an endless meditation. When he
began again nothing betrayed in him the slightest consciousness of
these intervals. There was the same fixed glance, the same unchanged
earnestness of tone. He didn't know. Indeed, more than one of these
pauses occurred in the middle of a sentence.

"The commanding officer listened to the tale. It struck him as more
plausible than simple truth is in the habit of being. But that, perhaps,
was prejudice. All the time the Northman was speaking the commanding
officer had been aware of an inward voice, a grave murmur in the depth
of his very own self, telling another tale, as if on purpose to keep
alive in him his indignation and his anger with that baseness of greed
or of mere outlook which lies often at the root of simple ideas.