He came into the “workroom,” closing the door behind him with his heel, his hands deep in his pockets.  Lloyd was still there, standing opposite him as he entered.  She hardly seemed to have moved while he had been gone.  They did not immediately speak.  Once more their eyes met.  Then at length: 

“Well, Lloyd?”

“Well, my husband?”

Bennett was about to answer—­what, he hardly knew; but at that moment there was a diversion.

The old boat’s flag, the tattered little square of faded stars and bars that had been used to mark the line of many a weary march, had been hanging, as usual, over the blue-print plans of the Freja on the wail opposite the window.  Inadequately fixed in its place, the jar of the closing door as Bennett shut it behind him dislodged it, and it fell to the floor close beside him.

He stooped and picked it up, and, holding it in his hand, turned toward the spot whence it had fallen.  He cast a glance at the wall above the plans of the Freja, about to replace it, willing for the instant to defer the momentous words he felt must soon be spoken, willing to put off the inevitable a few seconds longer.

“I don’t know,” he muttered, looking from the flag to the empty wall-spaces about the room; “I don’t know just where to put this.  Do you—­”

“Don’t you know?” interrupted Lloyd suddenly, her blue eyes all alight.

“No,” said Bennett; “I—­”

Lloyd caught the flag from his hands and, with one great sweep of her arm, drove its steel-shod shaft full into the centre of the great chart of the polar region, into the innermost concentric circle where the Pole was marked.

“Put that flag there!” she cried.

XI.

That particular day in the last week in April was sombre and somewhat chilly, but there was little wind.  The water of the harbour lay smooth as a sheet of tightly stretched gray silk.  Overhead the sea-fog drifted gradually landward, descending, as it drifted, till the outlines of the City grew blurred and indistinct, resolving to a dim, vast mass, rugged with high-shouldered office buildings and bulging, balloon-like domes, confused and mysterious under the cloak of the fog.  In the nearer foreground, along the lines of the wharves and docks, a wilderness of masts and spars of a tone just darker than the gray of the mist stood away from the blur of the background with the distinctness and delicacy of frost-work.

But amid all this grayness of sky and water and fog one distinguished certain black and shifting masses.  They outlined every wharf, they banked every dock, every quay.  Every small and inconsequent jetty had its fringe of black.  Even the roofs of the buildings along the water-front were crested with the same dull-coloured mass.

It was the People, the crowd, rank upon rank, close-packed, expectant, thronging there upon the City’s edge, swelling in size with the lapse of every minute, vast, conglomerate, restless, and throwing off into the stillness of the quiet gray air a prolonged, indefinite murmur, a monotonous minor note.