th his keen, clear sight, inherited from generations of Highland
ancestors, and now strode angrily across the moor, with great wrathful
steps, in his rival's direction. Frida nestled close to Bertram, to
protect her from the man to whom her country's laws and the customs of
her tribe would have handed her over blindfold. Bertram soothed her with
his hand, and awaited in silence, with some dim sense of awe, the angry
barbarian's arrival.

He came up very quickly, and stood full in front of them, glaring with
fierce eyes at the discovered lovers. For a minute or two his rage would
not allow him to speak, nor even to act; he could but stand and scowl
from under his brows at Bertram. But after a long pause his wrath found
words. "You infernal scoundrel!" he burst forth, "so at last I've
caught you! How dare you sit there and look me straight in the face? You
infernal thief, how dare you? how dare you?"

Bertram rose and confronted him. His own face, too, flushed slightly
with righteous indignation; but he answered for all that in the same
calm and measured tones as ever: "I am NOT a scoundrel, and I will not
submit to be called so even by an angry savage. I ask you in return,
how dare you follow us? You must have known your presence would be very
unwelcome. I should have thought this was just the one moment in your
life and the one place on earth where even YOU would have seen that to
stop away was your imperative duty. Mere self-respect would dictate such
conduct. This lady has given you clear proof indeed that your society
and converse are highly distasteful to her."

Robert Monteith glared across at him with the face of a tiger. "You
infamous creature," he cried, almost speechless with rage, "do you dare
to defend my wife's adultery?"

Bertram gazed at him with a strange look of mingled horror and
astonishment. "You poor wretch!" he answered, as calmly as before, but
with evident contempt; "how can you dare, such a thing as you, to apply
these vile words to your moral superiors? Adultery it was indeed, and
untruth to her own higher and purer nature, for this lady to spend one
night of her life under your roof with you; what she has taken now
in exchange is holy marriage, the only real and sacred marriage, the
marriage of true souls, to which even the wiser of yourselves, the poets
of your nation, would not admit impediment. If you dare to apply such
base language as this to my lady's actions, you must answer for it to