He shook his head. The roses shivered. "The true artist never thinks of that. To have a definite moral purpose is destructive." The City at their feet was sinking into shadow now, and the air grew cold, filled with the snowy breath of the Sierra. "When we go back to England I will teach you the right way to follow an art, to worship it; the way that will be mine." "Yours, Mark? But I don't understand." "No," he said. "You don't understand all of me yet, Kitty. Do you want to?" "Yes," she said. There was a sound of fear in her voice. Mark sat down beside her and put his arm round her. "Kitty," he began. "I'm only on the threshold of my life, of my real life, my life with you and with my work." "You are going to work?" she exclaimed. "Yes. That bell just now seemed to strike the hour of commencement--to tell me it was time for me to begin. I should like, some day--far in the future, Kitty,--to hear it strike that other hour, the hour when I must finish, when the little bit of work that I can do in the world is done. I shan't be afraid of that hour any more than I'm afraid of this one. Perhaps, when you and I 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. * * * * *