nd suddenly on my shoulder from behind me.

I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of
my stick.

There, in the middle of the broad bright high-road--there, as if it had
that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven--stood
the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white
garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to
the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.

I was far too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this
extraordinary apparition stood before me, in the dead of night and in
that lonely place, to ask what she wanted. The strange woman spoke
first.

"Is that the road to London?" she said.

I looked attentively at her, as she put that singular question to me.
It was then nearly one o'clock. All I could discern distinctly by the
moonlight was a colourless, youthful face, meagre and sharp to look at
about the cheeks and chin; large, grave, wistfully attentive eyes;
nervous, uncertain lips; and light hair of a pale, brownish-yellow hue.
There was nothing wild, nothing immodest in her manner: it was quiet
and self-controlled, a little melancholy and a little touched by
suspicion; not exactly the manner of a lady, and, at the same time, not
the manner of a woman in the humblest rank of life. The voice, little
as I had yet heard of it, had something curiously still and mechanical
in its tones, and the utterance was remarkably rapid. She held a small
bag in her hand: and her dress--bonnet, shawl, and gown all of
white--was, so far as I could guess, certainly not composed of very
delicate or very expensive materials. Her figure was slight, and
rather above the average height--her gait and actions free from the
slightest approach to extravagance. This was all that I could observe
of her in the dim light and under the perplexingly strange
circumstances of our meeting. What sort of a woman she was, and how
she came to be out alone in the high-road, an hour after midnight, I
altogether failed to guess. The one thing of which I felt certain was,
that the grossest of mankind could not have misconstrued her motive in
speaking, even at that suspiciously late hour and in that suspiciously
lonely place.

"Did you hear me?" she said, still quietly and rapidly, and without the
least fretfulness or impatience. "I asked if that was the way to
London."

"Yes," I replied, "that is the way: it leads to St. John's Wood and