"It doesn't concern the weather, of course?"
"It concerns the people, Mr. Trevelle. I'll tell you when the time comes. We are in London now, I think. My address is the Savoy Hotel. Send me yours there. To-night I'm off to Hampstead to see a little girl. She's just out of Ragusa, and it's to be imagined what this means to her. The north is merciless to the south in that respect. I'm afraid of the news I shall hear; more afraid than I can say."
He fell to silence suddenly as the train crossed Cannon Street bridge and the face of the river was disclosed. A drizzle of snow had begun to fall again, and many hummocks of block ice floated beneath the bridges. Such a night had not been seen since Victoria was Queen and Melbourne her Minister. They entered the station to the raucous shouts of the newsboys, crying the latest tidings of the frost.
In the suburbs, there was little real understanding of the momentous truth.
Kensington, Paddington, and Hampstead were frozen out, but their young people enjoyed the predicament. Weary water-men plugged the mains and wondered if Christmas half-crowns would compensate them for the trouble. Plumbers left footprints on the silks of time and had become great personages. The roads were like iron; the wood pavement impossible but for the sand which covered it. Even the meanest wore some kind of shabby furs, while the well-to-do were so many bundles of fine skins, from which rubicund jowls peeped out.
Faber went to the Savoy Hotel and rested a few hours in his room before going on to Hampstead. There were a few of his own countrymen there and they, oddly enough, spoke of a mild winter in Eastern America and a general absence of severity throughout the States. He learned with some surprise that his meeting with the Emperor had been made known to New York and was considered a triumph of a personal kind--though it had given offence in some religious circles and was supposed to be antagonistic to the peace idea. He determined to confute this without loss of time, holding, as he did, the firm faith that the Kaiser was the one great instrument of peace in the western world, and had the sanest ideas upon the subject. For the first time in his life, there was a trouble of the conscience concerning his own business and the mission upon which it had sent him. Was he, in truth, an obstacle to a gospel which had begun to obsess the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race? He knew that the charge was false and his pride resented it warmly. He desired peace absolutely--what forbade him to prepare the nations for war?