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 t