sure that this was an affair of gravity in which ordinary
scruples ought not to count. It seemed to me that the woman was in
peril; at any rate the man had not disavowed a willingness to murder.
When a man is enacting the role of potential assassin he has not the
right to choose his audience.

After some little time I saw them, indistinct in the moonlight among the
trees. The man, tall and slender, seemed clothed in black; the woman
wore, as nearly as I could make out, a gown of gray stuff. Evidently
they were still unaware of my presence in the shadow, though for some
reason when they renewed their conversation they spoke in lower tones
and I could no longer understand. As I looked the woman seemed to sink
to the ground and raise her hands in supplication, as is frequently done
on the stage and never, so far as I knew, anywhere else, and I am now
not altogether sure that it was done in this instance. The man fixed his
eyes upon her; they seemed to glitter bleakly in the moonlight with an
expression that made me apprehensive that he would turn them upon me. I
do not know by what impulse I was moved, but I sprang to my feet out of
the shadow. At that instant the figures vanished. I peered in vain
through the spaces among the trees and clumps of undergrowth. The night
wind rustled the leaves; the lizards had retired early, reptiles of
exemplary habits. The little moon was already slipping behind a black
hill in the west.

I went home, somewhat disturbed in mind, half doubting that I had heard
or seen any living thing excepting the lizards. It all seemed a trifle
odd and uncanny. It was as if among the several phenomena, objective and
subjective, that made the sum total of the incident there had been an
uncertain element which had diffused its dubious character over all--had
leavened the whole mass with unreality. I did not like it.

At the breakfast table the next morning there was a new face; opposite
me sat a young woman at whom I merely glanced as I took my seat. In
speaking to the high and mighty female personage who condescended to
seem to wait upon us, this girl soon invited my attention by the sound
of her voice, which was like, yet not altogether like, the one still
murmuring in my memory of the previous evening's adventure. A moment
later another girl, a few years older, entered the room and sat at the
left of the other, speaking to her a gentle "good morning." By _her_
voice I was startled: it was without doub