must marry his own sister, and so foully pollute with monstrous abortions the very stock he believed himself to be preserving intact from common or unclean influences.  His mind ran back to the strange and complicated forbidden degrees of the Australian Blackfellows, who are divided into cross-classes, each of which must necessarily marry into a certain other, and into that other only, regardless of individual tastes or preferences.  He remembered the profound belief of all these people that if they were to act in any other way than the one prescribed, some nameless misfortune or terrible evil would surely overtake them.  Yet, nowhere, he thought to himself, had he seen any system which entailed in the end so much misery on both sexes, though more particularly on the women, as that system of closely tabooed marriage, founded upon a broad basis of prostitution and infanticide, which has reached its most appalling height of development in hypocritical and puritan England.  The ghastly levity with which all Englishmen treated this most serious subject, and the fatal readiness with which even Frida herself seemed to acquiesce in the most inhuman slavery ever devised for women on the face of this earth, shocked and saddened Bertram’s profoundly moral and sympathetic nature.  He could sit there no longer to listen to their talk.  He bethought him at once of the sickening sights he had seen the evening before in a London music-hall; of the corrupting mass of filth underneath, by which alone this abomination of iniquity could be kept externally decent, and this vile system of false celibacy whitened outwardly to the eye like Oriental sepulchres:  and he strolled off by himself into the shrubbery, very heavy in heart, to hide his real feelings from the priest and the soldier, whose coarser-grained minds could never have understood the enthusiasm of humanity which inspired and informed him.

Frida rose and followed him, moved by some unconscious wave of instinctive sympathy.  The four children of this world were left together on the lawn by the rustic table, to exchange views by themselves on the extraordinary behaviour and novel demeanour of the mysterious Alien.

VII

As soon as he was gone, a sigh of relief ran half-unawares through the little square party.  They felt some unearthly presence had been removed from their midst.  General Claviger turned to Monteith.  “That’s a curious sort of chap,” he said slowly, in his military way.  “Who is he, and where does he come from?”

“Ah, where does he come from?—­that’s just the question,” Monteith answered, lighting a cigar, and puffing away dubiously.  “Nobody knows.  He’s a mystery.  He poses in the role.  You’d better ask Philip; it was he who brought him here.”