st difficulties in your art, to show that
you can succeed where others have failed?"

He looked at her curiously, realising that she had something to say to
him, and that she was trying to prepare the way before it.

"Come, Kitty," he said. "Say what you wish to say. You have the right.
What is it?"

Catherine told him of her conversation with Jenny.

"That little thin girl," he said. "So she thinks wickedness more
interesting, more many-sided than virtue, more dramatic in its
possibilities. Well, she and I are agreed. But what was it you wanted?"

"Mark, I want you to prove to her--to everyone--that it is not so."

"How?"

"By writing a different kind of book--a noble book. You can do it. Where
others have failed, you can succeed."

He laughed at her, gaily.

"Perhaps, some day, I'll try," he said. "But I can only write at present
what I have conceived. Till this book is done, I can think of nothing
else. I see you are interested, Kitty. I must tell you all I am
intending to do."

He continued, until it was quite evening, expatiating on the force with
which he intended to realise in literature the terrors that trooped in
his imagination. And by the time he had finished and darkness stood
under the trees, Catherine was carried away by the pagan spirit. She
thought no more of the possible harm the projected book might work in
sensitive natures. She thought only of its power, which she acclaimed.

Mark kissed her with a solemnity of passion he had never shown before,
and they went back to the house.

It was an immense relief to Mark to open his book of revelation and to
allow Catherine to read these pages in it. But he could not be
continuously unreserved to any human being. And that evening he subsided
into his former light-hearted gaiety, and shrouded the stranger man in
an impenetrable veil. Catherine sat with him in wonderment, while the
moon came up behind the trees and shone over the clearing before the
house. She did not yet understand the inflexible secrecies of genius. A
nightingale sang. Its voice was so sweet that Catherine felt as if the
whole world were full of tenderness and of sympathy. She said so to
Mark, just as she was turning from him to go to bed.

"Ah, Kitty," he said, "there are other things in the world besides
tenderness and sympathy, thank Heaven. There are terrors, there are
crimes, there are strange and fearful things both within us and outside
of us."

"How sad that is, Mark!