ful to an invisible multitude, hidden out in the great world.
But there was a difference between last year and this, so like in many
ways. Mark's power had grown in the interval. He had become more
dangerous. And Catherine had developed also. Circumstance--spoken of by
Berrand--had changed, twisted into a different shape by dying hands,
twisted again by the hands--all unconscious--of that man who talked
downstairs, of Berrand. Was he, too, an agent of Fate, at which he
scornfully laughed? Why not?

Oh, those everlasting voices! they rang hatefully in the sleepless
woman's ears. Their eagerness, their enthusiasm, were terrible to her.
For now their joy seemed to summon her to a great darkness. Their sound
seemed to call her to the making of a great silence. She put her hands
over her ears, but she still heard them till it was dawn. She still
heard them when they were no more speaking.

From this time Catherine waited indeed, but with a patience quite
different from that which possessed her formerly. Then she was
expectant, almost superstitiously expectant, of an abrupt interposition
of Fate. Now she waited, but with less expectancy, and with a strange
and growing sense of personal obligation which had been totally absent
from her before the issue lay between the thing invisible and herself.
And each day that passed brought the issue a step nearer to her. How
pathetical seemed to her the ignorance of the two men who were her
companions in the cloistered house at this time. Tears rose in her eyes
at the thought of her secret and their impotence to know it. But then
she thought of her mother's death-bed and the tears ran dry. For the
spirit of her mother surely was with her in the dark, the spirit that
knew all now and that could inspire and direct her.

The book grew and Catherine waited. Would Mark be allowed to complete
it? that was the great question. If he was, then the burden of action
was laid upon her by the will of God. She had quite made up her mind on
that. She had even prayed, and believed that an answer had been given to
her prayer, and that the answer was--"In the event you anticipate it is
God's will that you should act." She was fully resolved to do God's
will. And so she waited, with a strong, but how anxious, patience. The
growth of the book was now become ironical to her as the growth of a
plant which must die when it attains a certain height; the labour spent
upon it, the discussion that raged around i