Frida looked up at him with admiration in her big black eyes.  She had found the truth, and the truth had made her free.

“O Bertram,” she cried with a tremor, “it’s good to be like you.  I felt from the very first how infinitely you differed from the men about me.  You seemed so much greater and higher and nobler.  How grateful I ought to be to Robert Monteith for having spoken to me yesterday and forbidden me to see you! for if he hadn’t, you might never have kissed me last night, and then I might never have seen things as I see them at present.”

There was another long pause; for the best things we each say to the other are said in the pauses.  Then Frida relapsed once more into speech:  “But what about the children?” she asked rather timidly.

Bertram looked puzzled.  “Why, what about the children?” he repeated in a curious way.  “What difference on earth could that make to the children?”

“Can I bring them with me, I mean?” Frida asked, a little tremulous for the reply.  “I couldn’t bear to leave them.  Even for you, dear Bertram, I could never desert them.”

Bertram gazed at her dismayed.  “Leave them!” he cried.  “Why, Frida, of course you could never leave them.  Do you mean to say anybody would be so utterly unnatural, even in England, as to separate a mother from her own children?”

“I don’t think Robert would let me keep them,” Frida faltered, with tears in her eyes; “and if he didn’t, the law, of course, would take his side against me.”

“Of course!” Bertram answered, with grim sarcasm in his face, “of course!  I might have guessed it.  If there is an injustice or a barbarity possible, I might have been sure the law of England would make haste to perpetrate it.  But you needn’t fear, Frida.  Long before the law of England could be put in motion, I’ll have completed my arrangements for taking you—­and them too—­with me.  There are advantages sometimes even in the barbaric delay of what your lawyers are facetiously pleased to call justice.”

“Then I may bring them with me?” Frida cried, flushing red.

Bertram nodded assent.  “Yes,” he said, with grave gentleness.  “You may bring them with you.  And as soon as you like, too.  Remember, dearest, every night you pass under that creature’s roof, you commit the vilest crime a woman can commit against her own purity.”

XI

Never in her life had Frida enjoyed anything so much as those first four happy days at Heymoor.  She had come away with Bertram exactly as Bertram himself desired her to do, without one thought of anything on earth except to fulfil the higher law of her own nature; and she was happy in her intercourse with the one man who could understand it, the one man who had waked it to its fullest pitch, and could make it resound sympathetically to his touch in every chord and every fibre.  They had chosen a lovely spot on a heather-clad