The consul thought it might be amusing. "By all means let us see that. I
shall be delighted to go with you."

His ready and unqualified assent appeared to relieve and dissipate the
lady's abstraction. She became more natural and confiding; spoke freely
of Malcolm's mania, which she seemed to accept as a hallucination or a
conviction with equal cheerfulness, and, in brief, convinced the
consul that her connection with the scheme was only the caprice of
inexperienced and unaccustomed idleness. He left her, promising to
return the next day and arrange for their early departure.

His way home lay through one of the public squares of St. Kentigern, at
an hour of the afternoon when it was crossed by working men and women
returning to their quarters from the docks and factories. Never in any
light a picturesque or even cheery procession, there were days when
its unwholesome, monotonous poverty and dull hopelessness of prospect
impressed him more forcibly. He remembered how at first the spectacle
of barefooted girls and women slipping through fog and mist across the
greasy pavement had offended his fresh New World conception of a more
tenderly nurtured sex, until his susceptibilities seemed to have grown
as callous and hardened as the flesh he looked upon, and he had begun to
regard them from the easy local standpoint of a distinct and differently
equipped class.

It chanced, also, that this afternoon some of the male workers had added
to their usual solidity a singular trance-like intoxication. It had
often struck him before as a form of drunkenness peculiar to the St.
Kentigern laborers. Men passed him singly and silently, as if following
some vague alcoholic dream, or moving through some Scotch mist of