The captain knocked.  There was no doubt about that knock.  The door surrendered to him.  His is a peremptory summons.  The old master mariner brought his bulk with dignity into the room, and his wife, reaching up to that superior height, too slight for the task, ministered to the overcoat of the big figure which was making, all unconsciously, disdainful noises in its throat.  It would have been worse than useless for me to interfere.  The pair would have repelled me.  This was a domestic rite.  Once in his struggle with his coat the dominant figure glanced down at the earnestness of his little mate, paused for a moment, and the stern face relaxed.

With his attention concentrated and severe even in so small an effort as taking from his broad back a reluctant coat, and the unvarying fixed intentness of the dark eyes over which the lids, loose with age, had partly folded, giving him the piercing look of a bird of prey; and the swarthiness of his face, massive, hairless, and acutely ridged, with its crown of tousled white hair, his was a figure which made it easy to believe the tales one had heard of him when he was the master of the Oberon, and drove his ship home with the new season’s tea, leaving, it is said, a trail of light spars all the way from Tientsin to the Channel.

The coat was off.  His wife had it over her arm, and was regarding with concern the big petulant face above her.  She said to him:  “Number Ten is let at last.  They’re a young couple who have got it.  He’s a sailor.”

The old man sat down at a corner of the table, stooped, and in one handful abruptly hauled the cat off the rug, laying its unresisting body across his knees, and rubbing its ribs with a hand that half covered it.  He did not appear to have heard what he had been told.  He did not look at her, but talked gravely to the fire.  “I met Dennison today,” he said, as if speaking aloud to himself, in surprise at meeting Dennison.  “Years since I saw him,” he continued, turning to me.  “Where was it now, where was it?  Must have been Canton River, the year he lost his ship.  Extraordinary to find Dennison still afloat.  Not many of those men about now.  You can go the length of the Dock Road today and see nothing and meet nobody.”

He looked again into the flames, fixedly, as though what he really wanted was only to be found in them.  His wife was at his elbow.  She, too, was watching them, still with his coat over her arm.  She spoke aloud, though more to herself than to us.  “She seemed such a nice little woman, too.  I couldn’t see the badge on his cap.”

“Eh?” said the old man, throwing the cat back to the floor and rounding to his wife.  “What’s that?  Let’s have tea, Mrs. Williams.  We’re both dreaming, and there’s a visitor.  What are you dreaming about?  You’ve nothing to dream about.”