But with a passionate oath, Robert Monteith seized her arm and flung her madly from him.  She fell, reeling, on one side.  His eyes were bloodshot with the savage thirst for vengeance.  He raised the deadly weapon.  Bertram Ingledew, still seated on the big round boulder, opened his breast in silence to receive the bullet.  There was a moment’s pause.  For that moment, even Monteith himself, in his maniac mood, felt dimly aware of that mysterious restraining power all the rest who knew him had so often felt in their dealings with the Alien.  But it was only for a moment.  His coarser nature was ill adapted to recognise that ineffable air as of a superior being that others observed in him.  He pulled the trigger and fired.  Frida gave one loud shriek of despairing horror.  Bertram’s body fell back on the bare heath behind it.

XII

Mad as he was with jealousy, that lowest and most bestial of all the vile passions man still inherits from the ape and tiger, Robert Monteith was yet quite sane enough to know in his own soul what deed he had wrought, and in what light even his country’s barbaric laws would regard his action.  So the moment he had wreaked to the full his fiery vengeance on the man who had never wronged him, he bent over the body with strangely eager eyes, expecting to see upon it some evidence of his guilt, some bloody mark of the hateful crime his own hand had committed.  At the same instant, Frida, recovering from his blow that had sent her reeling, rushed frantically forward, flung herself with wild passion on her lover’s corpse, and covered the warm lips with hot, despairing kisses.

One marvellous fact, however, impressed them both with a vague sense of the unknown and the mysterious from the very first second.  No spot nor trace of blood marred the body anywhere.  And, even as they looked, a strange perfume, as of violets or of burning incense, began by degrees to flood the moor around them.  Then slowly, while they watched, a faint blue flame seemed to issue from the wound in Bertram’s right side and rise lambent into the air above the murdered body.  Frida drew back and gazed at it, a weird thrill of mystery and unconscious hope beguiling for one moment her profound pang of bereavement.  Monteith, too, stood away a pace or two, in doubt and surprise, the deep consciousness of some strange and unearthly power overawing for a while even his vulgar and commonplace Scotch bourgeois nature.  Gradually, as they gazed, the pale blue flame, rising higher and higher, gathered force and volume, and the perfume as of violets became distinct on the air, like the savour of a purer life than this century wots of.  Bit by bit, the wan blue light, flickering thicker and thicker, shaped itself into the form and features of a man, even the outward semblance of Bertram Ingledew.  Shadowy, but transfigured with an ineffable glory, it hovered for a minute or two above the spot on the moor where the corpse had lain; for now they were aware that as the flame-shape formed, the body that lay dead upon the ground beneath dissolved by degrees and melted into it.  Not a trace was left on the heath of Robert Monteith’s crime:  not a dapple of blood, not a clot of gore:  only a pale blue flame and a persistent image represented the body that was once Bertram Ingledew’s.