around him, behind him, everywhere!

But perhaps it would go as quickly as it had come.

He had heard that this is sometimes a characteristic of fog.
Fortunately he had already selected a keg upon which to sit, so with
a patient fatalism, product of a brief but lurid career in Flemish
trenches, he resigned himself to wait. The keg was dry, that was
something, and if he spread the newspaper in his pocket over the
most sciatic part of the shrapneled leg he might escape with nothing
more than twinges.

How beautiful it was--this salt shroud from the sea! How it eddied
and funneled and whorled, now massing thick like frosted glass, now
thinning to a web of tissue. Suddenly, while he watched, a lane
broke through. He saw clearly the piles at the wharf's end, a
glimpse of dark water, and, between him and it, a figure huddled in
a cloak--a female figure, also sitting upon an upturned keg. Then
the magic mist closed in again.

"How the deuce did she get there?" the professor asked himself
crossly. "She wasn't there before the fog came." He remembered
having noticed that keg while choosing his own and there had been no
woman sitting on it then. "Anyway," he reflected, "I don't know her
and I won't have to speak to her." The thought warmed him so that he
almost forgot to shiver. From which you may gather that Professor
Spence was a bachelor, comparatively young; that he was of a
retiring disposition and the object of considerable unsolicited
attention in his own home town.