far away into the misty blue distance of Hampshire.  Bertram had just been speaking to her, as they sat on the dry sand, of the buried chieftain whose bones still lay hid under that grass-grown barrow, and of the slaughtered wives whose bodies slept beside him, massacred in cold blood to accompany their dead lord to the world of shadows.  He had been contrasting these hideous slaveries of taboo-ridden England, past or present, with the rational freedom of his own dear country, whither he hoped so soon with good luck to take her, when suddenly Frida raised her eager eyes from the ground, and saw somebody or something coming across the moor from eastward in their direction.

All at once, a vague foreboding of evil possessed her.  Hardly quite knowing why, she felt this approaching object augured no good to their happiness.  “Look, Bertram,” she cried, seizing his arm in her fright, “there’s somebody coming.”

Bertram raised his eyes and looked.  Then he shaded them with his hands.  “How strange!” he said simply, in his candid way:  “it looks for all the world just like the man who was once your husband!”

Frida rose in alarm.  “Oh, what can we do?” she cried, wringing her hands.  “What ever can we do?  It’s he!  It’s Robert!”

“Surely he can’t have come on purpose!” Bertram exclaimed, taken aback.  “When he sees us, he’ll turn aside.  He must know of all people on earth he’s the one least likely at such a time to be welcome.  He can’t want to disturb the peace of another man’s honeymoon!”

But Frida, better used to the savage ways of the world she had always lived in, made answer, shrinking and crouching, “He’s hunted us down, and he’s come to fight you.”

“To fight me!” Bertram exclaimed.  “Oh, surely not that!  I was told by those who ought best to know, you English had got far beyond the stage of private war and murderous vendetta.”

“For everything else,” Frida answered, cowering down in her terror of her husband’s vengeance, not for herself indeed so much as for Bertram.  “For everything else, we have; but not for a woman.”

There was no time just then, however, for further explanation of this strange anomaly.  Monteith had singled them out from a great distance with his keen, clear sight, inherited from generations of Highland ancestors, and now strode angrily across the moor, with great wrathful steps, in his rival’s direction.  Frida nestled close to Bertram, to protect her from the man to whom her country’s laws and the customs of her tribe would have handed her over blindfold.  Bertram soothed her with his hand, and awaited in silence, with some dim sense of awe, the angry barbarian’s arrival.

He came up very quickly, and stood full in front of them, glaring with fierce eyes at the discovered lovers.  For a minute or two his rage would not allow him to speak, nor even to act; he could but stand and scowl from under his brows at Bertram.  But after a long pause his wrath found words.  “You infernal scoundrel!” he burst forth, “so at last I’ve caught you!  How dare you sit there and look me straight in the face?  You infernal thief, how dare you? how dare you?”