There was no time just then, however, for further explanation of this strange anomaly. Monteith had singled them out from a great distance with 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 me, her natural protector, for I will not permit it.”

At the words, quick as lightning, Monteith pulled from his pocket a loaded revolver and pointed it full at his rival. With a cry of terror, Frida flung herself between them, and tried to protect her lover with the shield of her own body. But Bertram gently unwound her arms and held her off from him tenderly. “No, no, darling,” he said slowly, sitting down with wonderful calm upon a big grey sarsen-stone that abutted upon the pathway; “I had forgotten again; I keep always forgetting what kind of savages I have to deal with. If I chose, I could snatch that murderous weapon from his hand, and shoot him dead with it in self-defence—for I’m stronger than he is. But if I did, what use? I could never take you home with me. And after all, what could we either of us do in the end in this bad, wild world of your fellow-countrymen? They would take me and hang me; and all would be up with you. For your sake, Frida, to shield you from the effects of their cruel taboos, there’s but one course open: I must submit to this madman. He may shoot me if he will.... Stand free, and let him!”

But with a passionate oath, Robert Monteith seized her arm and flung her madly from him. She fell, reeling, on one side. His eyes were bloodshot with the savage thirst for vengeance. He raised the deadly weapon. Bertram Ingledew, still seated on the big round boulder, opened his breast in silence to receive the bullet. There was a moment’s pause. For that moment, even Monteith himself, in his maniac mood, felt dimly aware of that mysterious restraining power all the rest who knew him had so often felt in their dealings with the Alien. But it was only for a moment. His coarser nature was ill adapted to recognise that ineffable air as of a superior being that others observed in him. He pulled the trigger and fired. Frida gave one loud shriek of despairing horror. Bertram’s body fell back on the bare heath behind it.

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