The consul for the United States of America at the port of St. Kentigern
was sitting alone in the settled gloom of his private office. Yet it was
only high noon, of a "seasonable" winter's day, by the face of the clock
that hung like a pallid moon on the murky wall opposite to him. What
else could be seen of the apartment by the faint light that struggled
through the pall of fog outside the lustreless windows presented the
ordinary aspect of a business sanctum. There were a shelf of fog-bound
admiralty law, one or two colored prints of ocean steamships under
full steam, bow on, tremendously foreshortened, and seeming to force
themselves through shadowy partitions; there were engravings of Lincoln
and Washington, as unsubstantial and shadowy as the dead themselves.
Outside, against the window, which was almost level with the street,
an occasional procession of black silhouetted figures of men and women,
with prayer-books in their hands and gloom on their faces, seemed to be
born of the fog, and prematurely to return to it. At which a conviction
of sin overcame the consul. He remembered that it was the Sabbath day,
and that he had no business to be at the consulate at all.

Unfortunately, with this shameful conviction came the sound of a bell
ringing somewhere in the depths of the building, and the shuffling of
feet on the outer steps. The light of his fire had evidently been seen,
and like a beacon had attracted some wandering and possibly intoxicated
mariner with American papers. The consul walked into the hall with a
sudden righteous frigidity of manner. It was one thing to be lounging
in one's own office on the Sabbath day, and quite another to be
deliberately calling there on business.

He opened the front door, and a middle-aged man entered, accompanying
and partly shoving forward a more diffident and younger one. Neither