rl 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
wi