show
himself. The grasshoppers chirped and revelled in the grass. Mark and
Catherine sat in the wood, wandered on the hills, rode in the valleys,
cooed a little even, like the doves hidden in the green shadows of the
glades, and making ceaseless music. The lovers--for they were still
lovers at this time--made a gay dreamland for themselves. But dreams
cannot and ought not to last. If they did they would become painfully
enervating. One day, in the wood, Mark resumed the conversation of the
Pavilion.

"Because I am rich I must not be idle, Kitty," he said.

And into his dark eyes there crept that look of the stranger man.

"Thank God that I am rich," he added.

"Why, Mark dear?"

"Because I can dare to do what sort of work I choose," he answered. "The
pot boils without my labour. So I am independent of the public, whom I
will win in my own way. If I have to wait it will not matter."

And then, speaking with growing enthusiasm, he gave Kitty a sketch of a
book he had projected. The doves cooed all through the plot, which was a
sad and terrible one, very uncommon and very unlike Mark. Catherine
listened to it with, alternately, the mind of her father and the mind of
her mother. It was the old antagonism of the Puritan and the pagan. But
now it raged in one person instead of in two, as the girl sat under the
soft darkness of the trees, listening to the eager voice of her boy
husband, who was beginning at last to cast the skin of his reserve. The
voice went on and on, interrupted only by the doves. But sometimes
Catherine felt as if she leaned upon the painted railing of the
Pavilion, and heard the distant cries of the golden City. At last Mark
said,

"Kitty, that is what I mean to do."

"It is terrible," she said.

And she pursed her lips like her mother.

"Yes," Mark answered, with enthusiasm. "It is terrible. It is ghastly."

Catherine looked at him with an intense and growing surprise. She was
wondering how the conception of such horrors could take place in a man
so gay as Mark.

At last she said,

"Mark, you feel your own power, do you not?"

"Kitty," he replied quietly, almost modestly, yet with a firm gravity
that was strong, "I do feel that I have something to say and that I
shall be able to say it in my book. I have waited a long while. Now I
believe that I am ready, that it is time for me to begin."

"Then, Mark, if you feel that you have this power, don't you feel a
desire to conquer the greate