Chapter XI - Page 2

better part, and she felt in her soul that, come what might, it could not be taken away from her.

In this earthly paradise of pure love, undefiled, she spent three full days and part of another. On the morning of the fourth, she sent the country girl they had engaged to take care of the children, out on the moor with the little ones, while she herself and Bertram went off alone, past the barrow that overlooks the Devil's Saucepan, and out on the open ridge that stretches with dark growth of heath and bracken 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