n affectionate son, a kind
brother in his home, a generous comrade at school and college. Everybody
had a good word for him; his family, his tutors, his friends, his
servants. Like most young and ardent men he had had some follies. At
least they were never mean or ungenerous. He entered upon married life
with an unusually good record. Those who knew him casually, even many
who knew him well, considered that he was easily read, that he was
transparently frank, that, though highly intelligent, he was not
particularly subtle, and that no still waters ran deep in Mark Sirrett.
All these people were utterly wrong. Mark had a very curious side to his
nature, which remained almost unsuspected until after his marriage with
Catherine, but which eventually was to make a name very well known to
the world. He was, although apparently so open, in reality full of
reserve. He was full of ambition. And he had an exceptionally peculiar,
and exceptionally riotous, imagination. And this imagination he was
quite determined to express in an art--the art of literature. But his
reserve kept him inactive until he had left Oxford, when he went to live
in London, where eventually he met Catherine.

His reserve, and his artistic hesitation to work until he felt able to
do good work, held Mark's imagination in check as a dam holds water in
check. He sometimes wrote, but nobody knew that he wrote except one
friend, Frederic Berrand. And Berrand could be a silent man. Even to
Catherine, when he fell in love with her and wooed her, Mark did not
reveal his desire for fame, or his intention to win it. The girl loved
her lover for what he was, but not for all he was. Of the still water
that ran deep she as yet knew nothing. She thought her husband, who was
rich, who appeared gay, who had lived so far, as it seemed, idly enough,
would continue to live with her, as he had apparently lived without her,
brightly, honestly, a little thoughtlessly, a little vainly.

She had no sort of suspicion that she had married that very curious
phenomenon--a born artist. Had her mother suspected it she would have
been shocked. Had her father dreamed it he would have been delighted.
And Catherine herself? well, she was still a child at this time.

She and Mark went to Spain for their honeymoon, and lived in a tiny
white villa at Granada. It stood on the edge of the hill whose crown is
the exquisite and dream-like Alhambra. Its long and narrow garden ran
along the hillsi