Never in her life had Frida enjoyed anything so much as those first four happy days at Heymoor. She had come away with Bertram exactly as Bertram himself desired her to do, without one thought of anything on earth except to fulfil the higher law of her own nature; and she was happy in her intercourse with the one man who could understand it, the one man who had waked it to its fullest pitch, and could make it resound sympathetically to his touch in every chord and every fibre. They had chosen a lovely spot on a heather-clad moorland, where she could stroll alone with Bertram among the gorse and ling, utterly oblivious of Robert Monteith and the unnatural world she had left for ever behind her. Her soul drank in deep draughts of the knowledge of good and evil from Bertram's lips; she felt it was indeed a privilege to be with him and listen to him; she wondered how she could ever have endured that old bad life with the lower man who was never her equal, now she had once tasted and known what life can be when two well-matched souls walk it together, abreast, in holy fellowship. The children, too, were as happy as the day was long. The heath was heaven to them. They loved Bertram well, and were too young to be aware of anything unusual in the fact of his accompanying them. At the little inn on the hill-top where they stopped to lodge, nobody asked any compromising questions: and Bertram felt so sure he could soon complete his arrangements for taking Frida and the children “home,” as he still always phrased it, that Frida had no doubts for their future happiness. As for Robert Monteith, that bleak, cold man, she hardly even remembered him: Bertram's first kiss seemed almost to have driven the very memory of her husband clean out of her consciousness. She only regretted, now she had left him, the false and mistaken sense of duty which had kept her so long tied to an inferior soul she could never love, and did wrong to marry.