The Sergeant halted suddenly, crouching in the shadow of a hedge; they were close on the orchard now and, upon the stilly air was a soft rustle, a faint scraping sound and, parting the leafy screen, the Major saw a dark figure silhouetted above the wall, a nebulous shape that seemed to hang suspended a moment ere it vanished over the wall into my lady's garden.
"That weren't no apparation, sir!" whispered the Sergeant, looking to pan and priming, and, hurrying forward, pointed to a footprint in the soft, newly-turned soil. "Never heard as spectres wore shoes, sir." The Major, staring at that slender footprint, felt suddenly cold and sick, and wondered; then, as the Sergeant prepared to climb the wall, checked him:
"Wait—wait you here!" he muttered. "Make way!" Reaching up, the Major swung himself astride the coping and silently mounted the wall. Before him was a flagged walk which, as he remembered, led to the arbour; this walk he avoided and, stepping in among the bushes, began to advance cautiously, eyes and ears on the strain, for the shadows lay dense hereabouts. Thus he was close upon the arbour when he stopped suddenly, arrested by the sound of a man's voice, low and muffled.
"... 'tis you now, Bet, and only you——"
"... Ah God, how may I? And yet ... my own dear, have I ever refused thee ... I've yearned for thee so..." Here the sound of passionate kisses.
It was her voice indeed, but so tender, so full of thrilling gentleness! The Major shivered and a sudden faintness and nausea seizing him, leaned weakly against a tree, and ever, as he leaned thus, their voices reached him—his low and eager, hers a-thrill with tenderness.
The Major turned and, groping like one blind, crept back until he came to the wall and crouching there, his head between his arms, seemed to shake and writhe as with some horrible convulsion.
"That you, sir?" a voice whispered hoarsely. Silently the Major drew himself up and dropped back into his own grounds.
"What was it, sir?"
"Nought, Zeb."