"That's a dangerous doctrine. You believe that criminals are irresponsible then?" "I don't know," she said. "I suppose there must be an agent. Yes, I suppose there must." She spoke as one who is thinking out a problem. "God," she continued, after a moment of silence, "may choose to use a man or woman as an agent instead of a disease." "Oh, well," said Berrand, with his odd, high laugh, "I cannot go with you on that road of thought, Mrs. Sirrett. I am not afflicted with a religion. Oh, here's Mark. How have you been getting on, Mr. William Foster?" "Grandly," he replied. His dark eyes were blazing with excitement. Catherine suddenly turned very cold. She got up and left the room. The two men scarcely noticed her departure. They plunged into an eager discussion on the book. They debated it till the night waned and the melancholy breath of dawn stole in at the open window. Meanwhile, Catherine, who had gone to bed, lay awake. This summer was so like last summer. Now, as then, she was sleepless, and heard the distant, excited voices rising and falling, murmuring on and on hour after hour. Now, as then, they accompanied activity. Now, as then, the activity was deadly, harmful 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.