head from her hands and gazed across at him scornfully.

"I was thinking," Monteith began, feeling his way with caution, but with
a magnanimous air, "that perhaps--after all--for the children's sake,
Frida--"

With a terrible look, his wife rose up and fronted him. Her face was red
as fire; her heart was burning. She spoke with fierce energy. "Robert
Monteith," she said firmly, not even deigning to treat him as one who
had once been her husband, "for the children's sake, or for my own sake,
or for any power on earth, do you think, poor empty soul, after I've
spent three days of my life with HIM, I'd ever spend three hours again
with YOU? If you do, then this is all: murderer that you are, you
mistake my nature."

And turning on her heel, she moved slowly away towards the far edge of
the moor with a queenly gesture.

Monteith followed her up a step or two. She turned and waved him back.
He stood glued to the ground, that weird sense of the supernatural once
more overcoming him. For some seconds he watched her without speaking a
word. Then at last he broke out. "What are you going to do, Frida?" he
asked, almost anxiously.

Frida turned and glanced back at him with scornful eyes. Her mien was
resolute. The revolver with which he had shot Bertram Ingledew lay close
by her feet, among the bracken on the heath, where Monteith had flung
it. She picked it up with one hand, and once more waved him backward.

"I'm going to follow him," she answered solemnly, in a very cold voice,
"where YOU have sent him. But alone by myself: not here, before you."
And she brushed him away, as he tried to seize it, with regal dignity.

Monteith, abashed, turned back without one word, and made his way to
the inn in the little village. But Frida walked on by herself, in the
opposite direction, across the open moor and through the purple heath,
towards black despair and the trout-ponds at Broughton.

THE END

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