of evil. Then he caught her bodily in his arms like a man who has
never associated the purest and noblest of human passions with any
lower thought, any baser personality. He had not taken his first
lessons in the art of love from the wearied lips of joyless
courtesans whom his own kind had debased and unsexed and degraded
out of all semblance of womanhood. He bent over the woman of his
choice and kissed her with chaste warmth. On the forehead first,
then, after a short interval, twice on the lips. At each kiss, from
which she somehow did not shrink, as if recognising its purity,
Frida felt a strange thrill course through and through her. She
quivered from head to foot. The scales fell from her eyes. The
taboos of her race grew null and void within her. She looked up at
him more boldly. "O Bertram," she whispered, nestling close to his
side, and burying her blushing face in the man's curved bosom, "I
don't know what you've done to me, but I feel quite different--as
if I'd eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil."

"I hope you have," Bertram answered, in a very solemn voice; "for,
Frida, you will need it." He pressed her close against his breast;
and Frida Monteith, a free woman at last, clung there many minutes
with no vile inherited sense of shame or wrongfulness. "I can't
bear to go," she cried, still clinging to him and clutching him
tight. "I'm so happy here, Bertram; oh, so happy, so happy!"

"Then why go away at all?" Bertram asked, quite simply.

Frida drew back in horror. "Oh, I must," she said, coming to
herself: "I must, of course, because of Robert."

Bertram held her hand, smoothing it all the while with his own, as