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.