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 when I was most willing to forget the highest, I don't think a little paltry prosperity in the commonplace atmosphere of a colony would have tempted me to sell my birthright." The man she was rating answered, and the clear voice came proudly again: "You have at least got the pottage that pleases you--you are a success in this Canadian world." Just then the soft, wet sound of feet tramping in mud came to him, and apparently the sound of his own feet was heard also, for the talking stopped until he had passed them.

He discerned their figures, but so dimly he could hardly have told they were man and woman had he not known it before by their voices.

They were walking very fast, and so was he.
In a moment or two they were out of sight, and he had ceased to hear their footsteps.