u're afraid he'll discover
you?"

Frida spoke under her breath, in a voice half-choked with frequent sobs.
"Don't talk too loud," she whispered. "Miss Blake doesn't know I'm here.
If she did, she'd tell on me. I slipped in quietly through the open back
door. But I felt I MUST--I really, really MUST. I COULDN'T stop away; I
COULDN'T help it."

Bertram gazed at her, distressed. Her tone was distressing. Horror and
indignation for a moment overcame him. She had had to slip in there like
a fugitive or a criminal. She had had to crawl away by stealth from that
man, her keeper. She, a grown woman and a moral agent, with a will of
her own and a heart and a conscience, was held so absolutely in serfdom
as a particular man's thrall and chattel, that she could not even go
out to visit a friend without these degrading subterfuges of creeping in
unperceived by a back entrance, and talking low under her breath, lest
a lodging-house crone should find out what she was doing. And all the
world of England was so banded in league with the slave-driver against
the soul he enslaved, that if Miss Blake had seen her she could hardly
have come in: while, once in, she must tremble and whisper and steal
about with muffled feet, for fear of discovery in this innocent
adventure. He held his breath with stifled wrath. It was painful and
degrading.

But he had no time just then to think much of all this, for there sat
Frida, tremulous and shivering before his very eyes, trying hard to hide
her beautiful white face in her quivering hands, and murmuring over and
over again in a very low voice, like an agonised creature, "I couldn't
BEAR not to be allowed to say good-bye to you for ever."

Bertram smoothed her cheek gently. She tried to prevent him, but he went
on in spite of her, with a man's strong persistence. Notwithstanding his
gentleness he was always virile. "Good-bye!" he cried. "Good-bye! why on
earth good-bye, Frida? When I left you before dinner you never said one
word of it to me."

"Oh, no," Frida cried, sobbing. "It's all Robert, Robert! As soon as
ever you were gone, he called me into the library--which always means
he's going to talk over some dreadful business with me--and he said
to me, 'Frida, I've just heard from Phil that this man Ingledew, who's
chosen to foist himself upon us, holds opinions and sentiments which
entirely unfit him from being proper company for any lady. Now, he's
been coming here a great deal too often of