sobs. "Don't talk too loud," she whispered. "Miss Blake doesn't
know I'm here. If she did, she'd tell on me. I slipped in quietly
through the open back door. But I felt I MUST--I really, really
MUST. I COULDN'T stop away; I COULDN'T help it."

Bertram gazed at her, distressed. Her tone was distressing. Horror
and indignation for a moment overcame him. She had had to slip in
there like a fugitive or a criminal. She had had to crawl away by
stealth from that man, her keeper. She, a grown woman and a moral
agent, with a will of her own and a heart and a conscience, was
held so absolutely in serfdom as a particular man's thrall and
chattel, that she could not even go out to visit a friend without
these degrading subterfuges of creeping in unperceived by a back
entrance, and talking low under her breath, lest a lodging-house
crone should find out what she was doing. And all the world of
England was so banded in league with the slave-driver against the
soul he enslaved, that if Miss Blake had seen her she could hardly
have come in: while, once in, she must tremble and whisper and
steal about with muffled feet, for fear of discovery in this
innocent adventure. He held his breath with stifled wrath. It
was painful and degrading.

But he had no time just then to think much of all this, for there
sat Frida, tremulous and shivering before his very eyes, trying
hard to hide her beautiful white face in her quivering hands, and
murmuring over and over again in a very low voice, like an agonised
creature, "I couldn't BEAR not to be allowed to say good-bye to you
for ever."

Bertram smoothed her cheek gently. She tried to prevent him, but