arriage, founded upon a broad basis of prostitution and
infanticide, which has reached its most appalling height of development
in hypocritical and puritan England. The ghastly levity with which all
Englishmen treated this most serious subject, and the fatal readiness
with which even Frida herself seemed to acquiesce in the most inhuman
slavery ever devised for women on the face of this earth, shocked and
saddened Bertram's profoundly moral and sympathetic nature. He could sit
there no longer to listen to their talk. He bethought him at once of the
sickening sights he had seen the evening before in a London music-hall;
of the corrupting mass of filth underneath, by which alone this
abomination of iniquity could be kept externally decent, and this vile
system of false celibacy whitened outwardly to the eye like Oriental
sepulchres: and he strolled off by himself into the shrubbery, very
heavy in heart, to hide his real feelings from the priest and the
soldier, whose coarser-grained minds could never have understood the
enthusiasm of humanity which inspired and informed him.

Frida rose and followed him, moved by some unconscious wave of
instinctive sympathy. The four children of this world were left together
on the lawn by the rustic table, to exchange views by themselves on the
extraordinary behaviour and novel demeanour of the mysterious Alien.

VII

As soon as he was gone, a sigh of relief ran half-unawares through the
little square party. They felt some unearthly presence had been removed
from their midst. General Claviger turned to Monteith. "That's a curious
sort of chap," he said slowly, in his military way. "Who is he, and
where does he come from?"

"Ah, where does he come from?--that's just the question," Monteith
answered, lighting a cigar, and puffing away dubiously. "Nobody knows.
He's a mystery. He poses in the role. You'd better ask Philip; it was he
who brought him here."

"I met him accidentally in the street," Philip answered, with
an apologetic shrug, by no means well pleased at being thus held
responsible for all the stranger's moral and social vagaries. "It's the
merest chance acquaintance. I know nothing of his antecedents. I--er--I
lent him a bag, and he's fastened himself upon me ever since like a
leech, and come constantly to my sister's. But I haven't the remotest
idea who he is or where he hails from. He keeps his business wrapped up
from all of us in the profoundest mystery."

"H