first-born. "O
Bertram," she moaned, "where are you going? Do you mean to leave me?
Won't you save me from this man? Won't you take me home with you?"

Dim and hollow, as from the womb of time unborn, a calm voice came back
to her across the gulf of ages: "Your husband willed it, Frida, and the
customs of your nation. You can come to me, but I can never return to
you. In three days longer your probation would have been finished. But I
forgot with what manner of savage I had still to deal. And now I must go
back once more to the place whence I came--to THE TWENTY-FIFTH CENTURY."

The voice died away in the dim recesses of the future. The pale blue
flame flickered forward and vanished. The shadowy shape melted through
an endless vista of to-morrows. Only the perfume as of violets or of
a higher life still hung heavy upon the air, and a patch of daintier
purple burned bright on the moor, like a pool of crimson blood, where
the body had fallen. Only that, and a fierce ache in Frida's tortured
heart; only that, and a halo of invisible glory round the rich red lips,
where his lips had touched them.

XIII

Frida seated herself in her misery on the ice-worn boulder where three
minutes earlier Bertram had been sitting. Her face was buried in her
bloodless hands. All the world grew blank to her.

Monteith, for his part, sat down a little way off with folded arms on
another sarsen-stone, fronting her. The strange and unearthly scene
they had just passed through impressed him profoundly. For the first few
minutes a great horror held him. But his dogged Scottish nature still
brooded over his wrongs, in spite of the terrible sight he had so
unexpectedly evoked. In a way, he felt he had had his revenge; for had
he not drawn upon his man, and fired at him and killed him? Still, after
the fever and torment of the last few days, it was a relief to find,
after all, he was not, as this world would judge, a murderer. Man and
crime were alike mere airy phantoms. He could go back now to the inn and
explain with a glib tongue how Mr. Ingledew had been hurriedly called
away to town on important business. There was no corpse on the moor,
no blabbing blood to tell the story of his attempted murder: nobody
anywhere, he felt certain in his own stolid soul, would miss the
mysterious Alien who came to them from beyond the distant abyss of
centuries. With true Scotch caution, indeed, even in the midst of his
wrath, Robert Monteith had ne