"The circumstances are these.

On the day after I said good-bye to him, my father went for his usual morning walk, and was absent for two hours.

He returned looking very pale and disturbed, and with some difficulty was persuaded (you know how he disliked speaking of himself) to tell what had happened.

It seems that, somewhere on the lonely road, he came across two men, honest-looking country folk, engaged in a violent quarrel; their language made it clear that one accused the other of some sort of slander, a very trivial affair.

Just as my father came up to them, they began fighting.