His arm stole round her waist and drew her tenderly towards him.  Frida allowed the caress passively.  There was a robust frankness about his love-making that seemed to rob it of all taint or tinge of evil.  Then he caught her bodily in his arms like a man who has never associated the purest and noblest of human passions with any lower thought, any baser personality.  He had not taken his first lessons in the art of love from the wearied lips of joyless courtesans whom his own kind had debased and unsexed and degraded out of all semblance of womanhood.  He bent over the woman of his choice and kissed her with chaste warmth.  On the forehead first, then, after a short interval, twice on the lips.  At each kiss, from which she somehow did not shrink, as if recognising its purity, Frida felt a strange thrill course through and through her.  She quivered from head to foot.  The scales fell from her eyes.  The taboos of her race grew null and void within her.  She looked up at him more boldly.  “O Bertram,” she whispered, nestling close to his side, and burying her blushing face in the man’s curved bosom, “I don’t know what you’ve done to me, but I feel quite different—­as if I’d eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”

“I hope you have,” Bertram answered, in a very solemn voice; “for, Frida, you will need it.”  He pressed her close against his breast; and Frida Monteith, a free woman at last, clung there many minutes with no vile inherited sense of shame or wrongfulness.  “I can’t bear to go,” she cried, still clinging to him and clutching him tight.  “I’m so happy here, Bertram; oh, so happy, so happy!”

“Then why go away at all?” Bertram asked, quite simply.

Frida drew back in horror.  “Oh, I must,” she said, coming to herself:  “I must, of course, because of Robert.”

Bertram held her hand, smoothing it all the while with his own, as he mused and hesitated.  “Well, it’s clearly wrong to go back,” he said, after a moment’s pause.  “You ought never, of course, to spend another night with that man you don’t love and should never have lived with.  But I suppose that’s only a counsel of perfection:  too hard a saying for you to understand or follow for the present.  You’d better go back, just to-night:  and, as time moves on, I can arrange something else for you.  But when shall I see you again?—­ for now you belong to me.  I sealed you with that kiss.  When will you come and see me?”

“I can’t come here, you know,” Frida whispered, half-terrified; “for if I did, Miss Blake would see me.”

Bertram smiled a bitter smile to himself.  “So she would,” he said, musing.  “And though she’s not the least interested in keeping up Robert Monteith’s proprietary claim on your life and freedom, I’m beginning to understand now that it would be an offence against that mysterious and incomprehensible entity they call respectability if she were to allow me to receive you in her rooms.  It’s all very curious.  But, of course, while I remain, I must be content to submit to it.  By-and-by, perhaps, Frida, we two may manage to escape together from this iron generation.  Meanwhile, I shall go up to London less often for the present, and you can come and meet me, dear, in the Middle Mill Fields at two o’clock on Monday.”