idence of his
guilt, some bloody mark of the hateful crime his own hand had committed.
At the same instant, Frida, recovering from his blow that had sent her
reeling, rushed frantically forward, flung herself with wild passion
on her lover's corpse, and covered the warm lips with hot, despairing
kisses.

One marvellous fact, however, impressed them both with a vague sense of
the unknown and the mysterious from the very first second. No spot nor
trace of blood marred the body anywhere. And, even as they looked, a
strange perfume, as of violets or of burning incense, began by degrees
to flood the moor around them. Then slowly, while they watched, a faint
blue flame seemed to issue from the wound in Bertram's right side and
rise lambent into the air above the murdered body. Frida drew back and
gazed at it, a weird thrill of mystery and unconscious hope beguiling
for one moment her profound pang of bereavement. Monteith, too, stood
away a pace or two, in doubt and surprise, the deep consciousness of
some strange and unearthly power overawing for a while even his vulgar
and commonplace Scotch bourgeois nature. Gradually, as they gazed, the
pale blue flame, rising higher and higher, gathered force and volume,
and the perfume as of violets became distinct on the air, like the
savour of a purer life than this century wots of. Bit by bit, the wan
blue light, flickering thicker and thicker, shaped itself into the form
and features of a man, even the outward semblance of Bertram Ingledew.
Shadowy, but transfigured with an ineffable glory, it hovered for a
minute or two above the spot on the moor where the corpse had lain; for
now they were aware that as the flame-shape formed, the body that lay
dead upon the ground beneath dissolved by degrees and melted into it.
Not a trace was left on the heath of Robert Monteith's crime: not
a dapple of blood, not a clot of gore: only a pale blue flame and a
persistent image represented the body that was once Bertram Ingledew's.

Again, even as they looked, a still weirder feeling began to creep over
them. The figure, growing fainter, seemed to fade away piecemeal in
the remote distance. But it was not in space that it faded; it appeared
rather to become dim in some vaguer and far more mysterious fashion,
like the memories of childhood or the aching abysses of astronomical
calculation. As it slowly dissolved, Frida stretched out her hands to
it with a wild cry, like the cry of a mother for her