leness of these surroundings, and by keen
interest in the old man who had once visited him, Alec decided on the
walk. The mountain was nearer than the village; he hoped to reach it in
time. He was told to keep on the same road till he came to the river, to
follow its bank for about a mile, and when he saw the buildings of a
farm just under the hill, to turn up a lane which would lead him by the
house to the principal ascent. He walked out into the night.

At first he was full of thoughts, but after walking a while, fatigue and
monotony made him dull. His intelligence seemed to dwell now in his
muscles rather than in his brain. His feet told him on what sort of a
road he was walking; by his fatigue he estimated, without conscious
thought, how far he had walked.

When he had gone for nearly two hours the storm had come so much nearer
that the lightning constantly blinded his eyes. He heard now the rushing
of the river, and, as he turned into the road by its side, he saw the
black hill looming large. Nothing but the momentum of a will already
made up kept his intention turned to the climb, so unpropitious was the
time, so utterly lonely the place. As it was, with quiescent mind and
vigorous step, he held on down the smooth road that lay beside the
swollen river.

Some way farther, when the water had either grown quieter or his ear
accustomed to the sound, human voices I became audible, approaching on
the road. Perhaps they might have been two or three hundred yards away
when he first heard them, and from that moment his mind, roused from its
long monotony, became wholly intent upon those who were drawing near.

It was a woman's voice he heard, and before he could see her in the
least, or even hear her footsteps in the soft mud, the sense of her
words came to him. She was, evidently speaking under the influence of
excitement, not loudly, but with that peculiar quality of tone which
sometimes makes a female voice carry further than is intended. She was
addressing some companion; she was also walking fast.

"There _was_ a time when I thought you were ambitious, and would
therefore do great things."

There was an exquisite edge of disdain in her tone that seemed to make
every word an insult that would have had power, Alec thought, to wither
any human vanity on which it might fall.

Some reply, she received--he could not hear it--and she went on with
such intensity in her voice that her words bore along the whole current