"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.