f good and evil from
Bertram's lips; she felt it was indeed a privilege to be with him and
listen to him; she wondered how she could ever have endured that old bad
life with the lower man who was never her equal, now she had once tasted
and known what life can be when two well-matched souls walk it together,
abreast, in holy fellowship.

The children, too, were as happy as the day was long. The heath was
heaven to them. They loved Bertram well, and were too young to be aware
of anything unusual in the fact of his accompanying them. At the little
inn on the hill-top where they stopped to lodge, nobody asked any
compromising questions: and Bertram felt so sure he could soon complete
his arrangements for taking Frida and the children "home," as he still
always phrased it, that Frida had no doubts for their future happiness.
As for Robert Monteith, that bleak, cold man, she hardly even remembered
him: Bertram's first kiss seemed almost to have driven the very memory
of her husband clean out of her consciousness. She only regretted, now
she had left him, the false and mistaken sense of duty which had kept
her so long tied to an inferior soul she could never love, and did wrong
to marry.

And all the time, what strange new lessons, what beautiful truths, she
learned from Bertram! As they strolled together, those sweet August
mornings, hand locked in hand, over the breezy upland, what new insight
he gave her into men and things! what fresh impulse he supplied to her
keen moral nature! The misery and wrong of the world she lived in came
home to her now in deeper and blacker hues than ever she had conceived
it in: and with that consciousness came also the burning desire of every
wakened soul to right and redress it. With Bertram by her side, she felt
she could not even harbour an unholy wish or admit a wrong feeling; that
vague sense of his superiority, as of a higher being, which she had felt
from the very first moment she met him at Brackenhurst, had deepened and
grown more definite now by closer intercourse; and she recognised that
what she had fallen in love with from the earliest beginning was the
beauty of holiness shining clear in his countenance. She had chosen at
last the 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 gi