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
of Alec's thought with them, though they came to him falling out of
darkness, without personality behind them.

"We may _call_ it ambition when we try to climb trees, but it is not
really so for us if we once had mountain-tops for our goal."

Again came a short reply, a man's voice so much lower in key that again
he could not hear; and then:

"Yes, I have wasted years in tree climbing, more shame to me; but even