Again, even as they looked, a still weirder feeling began to creep over them.  The figure, growing fainter, seemed to fade away piecemeal in the remote distance.  But it was not in space that it faded; it appeared rather to become dim in some vaguer and far more mysterious fashion, like the memories of childhood or the aching abysses of astronomical calculation.  As it slowly dissolved, Frida stretched out her hands to it with a wild cry, like the cry of a mother for her first-born.  “O Bertram,” she moaned, “where are you going?  Do you mean to leave me?  Won’t you save me from this man?  Won’t you take me home with you?”

Dim and hollow, as from the womb of time unborn, a calm voice came back to her across the gulf of ages:  “Your husband willed it, Frida, and the customs of your nation.  You can come to me, but I can never return to you.  In three days longer your probation would have been finished.  But I forgot with what manner of savage I had still to deal.  And now I must go back once more to the place whence I came—­to the twenty-fifth century.”

The voice died away in the dim recesses of the future.  The pale blue flame flickered forward and vanished.  The shadowy shape melted through an endless vista of to-morrows.  Only the perfume as of violets or of a higher life still hung heavy upon the air, and a patch of daintier purple burned bright on the moor, like a pool of crimson blood, where the body had fallen.  Only that, and a fierce ache in Frida’s tortured heart; only that, and a halo of invisible glory round the rich red lips, where his lips had touched them.

XIII

Frida seated herself in her misery on the ice-worn boulder where three minutes earlier Bertram had been sitting.  Her face was buried in her bloodless hands.  All the world grew blank to her.

Monteith, for his part, sat down a little way off with folded arms on another sarsen-stone, fronting her.  The strange and unearthly scene they had just passed through impressed him profoundly.  For the first few minutes a great horror held him.  But his dogged Scottish nature still brooded over his wrongs, in spite of the terrible sight he had so unexpectedly evoked.  In a way, he felt he had had his revenge; for had he not drawn upon his man, and fired at him and killed him?  Still, after the fever and torment of the last few days, it was a relief to find, after all, he was not, as this world would judge, a murderer.  Man and crime were alike mere airy phantoms.  He could go back now to the inn and explain with a glib tongue how Mr. Ingledew had been hurriedly called away to town on important business.  There was no corpse on the moor, no blabbing blood to tell the story of his attempted murder:  nobody anywhere, he felt certain in his own stolid soul, would miss the mysterious Alien who came to them from beyond the distant abyss