He
was thin, sallow, eager in manner, with shining eyes--almost
toad-like--a yellowish-white complexion, and coal-black hair. His
vivacity was un-English, yet at the back of his nature there lay surely
a stagnant reservoir of melancholy. He was a pessimist, full of ardour.
He revelled, intellectually, in the sorrows and in the evils that
afflict the world.

It was easy to see that he had a great influence over Mark. And it was
easy to see also that the dismal genius of "William Foster" appealed to
all the peculiarities of his nature with intense force. He was at once
on friendly terms with Catherine, to whom he spoke openly of his
admiration of her husband.

"Mrs. Sirrett," he said one evening, when Mark was working--he had taken
to working at night now as well as in the morning--"your husband will do
great things. He will found a school. The young men will be captivated
by his sombre genius, and we shall have less of the thoughtless rubbish
that the journalist loves and calls sane, healthy, and all the rest of
it."

"But surely sanity and health----"

"My dear Mrs. Sirrett, we want originality and imagination."

"Yes, indeed. But can't they be sane and healthy?"

"Was Gautier healthy when he wrote of the Priest and of the Vampire?
This book Mark is writing will be awful in its intensity. It will make
the world turn cold. It is terrible. People will shudder at it."

He walked about the room enthusiastically.

"And its terror is the true terror--mental. How the papers will hate it,
and how every one will read it!"

"May it--may it not do a great deal of harm?" said Catherine, slowly.

"What if it does? Nothing can prevent it from being a great book."

And he broke out into a dissertation on art that would have delighted
Mr. Ardagh.

Catherine listened to him in silence, but when he had finished she said,

"But you are one-sided, Mr. Berrand."

"I!" he cried. "How so?"

"You see only the horrible in life, even in love. You care only for the
horrible in art."

"The truth is more often horrible than not," he answered. "We dress it
in pink paper as we dress a burning lamp. We fear its light will hurt
our weak eyes. Almost all the pretty theories of future states, happy
hunting grounds, and so forth, almost all the fallacies of life to which
we are inclined to cling, are only pink paper shades which we make to
save ourselves from blinking at the light."

"You call it light?" she said.

And she felt a p