are old we shall come here again, and listen to
that bell once more, the same, when we are changed."

He pointed towards the Cathedral which was still touched by the sun.
Catherine leaned against his shoulder. She said nothing, and did not
move.

"Everything in life has its appointed recorder," he continued. "They are
a big band, the band of the recorders who strive accurately to write
down life as it is. Well, Kitty, I am going to be one of that band."

"You are going to be a writer, Mark?"

"Yes."

"Then, you will record the beauty, the joy, the purity, the goodness of
life?"

His usually bright face had become sombre and thoughtful. It looked
strangely dark and saturnine in the twilight.

"I shall record what I see most clearly."

"And what is that?"

"Not the things on the surface, but the things beneath the surface, of
life."

And then he told Catherine more fully of his ambition and gave her a
glimpse of the hidden side of his duplex nature.

She gazed up at him in the gathering twilight and it seemed to her that
she was looking at a stranger. The climbing roses still shook against
Mark in the wind. While he talked his voice grew almost fierce, and his
dark eyes shone like the eyes of a fanatic. When he ceased to speak,
Catherine's lips were pursed together, like her mother's when she
listened to the pagan rhapsodies of Mr. Ardagh.

Two days later the Sirretts left Granada for England.

* * * * *

On their return they paid a short visit to Catherine's parents, who were
living in Eaton Square. Mr. and Mrs. Ardagh received them with a sort of
dulled and narcotic affection. In truth, for different reasons, the
Puritan and the pagan cherished a certain resentment against the man
who had stepped in and robbed them of their cause of warfare.
Nevertheless they desired his company in their house. For each was
anxious to study him and to discover what influence he was likely to
have upon Catherine. During her daughter's absence Mrs. Ardagh had found
the emptiness of her childless life insupportable, and she had,
therefore, engaged a young girl, called Jenny Levita, to come to her
every day as companion. Jenny was intelligent and very poor, bookish and
earnest, even ardent in nature. Mrs. Ardagh gained a certain amount of
interest and pleasure from forming the pliant mind of her protegee, who
was with her always from eleven till six in the evening, who read aloud
to her, ac