u're mine now--a thousand times more truly mine
than ever you were Monteith's; and I can't do without you. You must
go back to your husband for the present, I suppose,--the circumstances
compel it, though I don't approve of it; but you must see me again...
and soon... and often, just the same as usual. I won't go to your house,
of course: the house is Monteith's; and everywhere among civilised and
rational races the sanctity of the home is rightly respected. But YOU
yourself he has no claim or right to taboo; and if _I_ can help it, he
shan't taboo you. You may go home now to-night, dear one; but you must
meet me often. If you can't come round to my rooms--for fear of Miss
Blake's fetich, the respectability of her house--we must meet elsewhere,
till I can make fresh arrangements."

Frida gazed up at him in doubt. "But will it be RIGHT, Bertram?" she
murmured.

The man looked down into her big eyes in dazed astonishment. "Why,
Frida," he cried, half-pained at the question, "do you think if it were
WRONG I'd advise you to do it? I'm here to help you, to guide you, to
lead you on by degrees to higher and truer life. How can you imagine
I'd ask you to do anything on earth unless I felt perfectly sure and
convinced it was the very most right and proper conduct?"

His arm stole round her waist and drew her tenderly towards him. Frida
allowed the caress passively. There was a robust frankness about his
love-making that seemed to rob it of all taint or tinge of evil. Then
he caught her bodily in his arms like a man who has never associated the
purest and noblest of human passions with any lower thought, any baser
personality. He had not taken his first lessons in the art of love from
the wearied lips of joyless courtesans whom his own kind had debased and
unsexed and degraded out of all semblance of womanhood. He bent over the
woman of his choice and kissed her with chaste warmth. On the forehead
first, then, after a short interval, twice on the lips. At each kiss,
from which she somehow did not shrink, as if recognising its purity,
Frida felt a strange thrill course through and through her. She quivered
from head to foot. The scales fell from her eyes. The taboos of her
race grew null and void within her. She looked up at him more boldly.
"O Bertram," she whispered, nestling close to his side, and burying her
blushing face in the man's curved bosom, "I don't know what you've done
to me, but I feel quite different--as if I'd