“What do you mean?”—­this was the voice of the woman, a cultivated voice, the voice of a lady.  “You would not—­murder us.”

There was no reply, at least none that was audible to me.  During the silence I peered into the wood in hope to get a glimpse of the speakers, for I felt 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 doubt the one of which the first girl’s had reminded me.  Here was the lady of the sylvan incident sitting bodily before me, “in her habit as she lived.”

Evidently enough the two were sisters.