A deep flush overspread her face, and then, retreating, left it paler than ever. Her fingers were pressed tightly into the palms of her hands, but she said nothing.
"I am frank," continued the Secretary, "but it is best between us. Finesse would be wasted upon one with your penetrating mind, and I pay you the highest compliment I know when I discard any attempt to use it. I find that I have made a great mistake in more respects than one. The man who I thought stood in my way thought so himself at one time, but he knows better. Helen Harley is very beautiful and all that is good, but still there is something lacking. I knew it long ago, but only in the last few weeks has it had its effect upon me. This man I thought my rival has turned aside into a new path, and I—well, it seems that fate intends that he shall be my rival even in his changes—have followed him."
"What do you mean?" she asked, a sudden fire leaping to her eyes and a cold dread clutching her heart.
"I mean," he said, "that however beautiful Helen Harley may be, there are others as beautiful and one perhaps who has something that she lacks. What is that something? The power to feel passion, to love with a love that cares for nothing else, and if need be to hate with a hate that cares for nothing else. She must be a woman with fire in her veins and lightning in her heart, one who would appear to the man she loves not only a woman, but as a goddess as well."
"And have you found such a woman?"
She spoke in cold, level tones.
The Secretary looked at her sitting there, her head thrown slightly back, her eyes closed and the curve of her chin defiant to the uttermost degree. The wonder that he had not always loved this woman instead of Helen Harley returned to him. She was a girl and yet she was not; there was nothing about her immature or imperfect; she was girl and woman, too. She had spoken to him in the coldest of tones, yet he believed in the fire beneath the ice. He wished to see what kind of torch would set the flame. His feeling for her before had been intellectual, now it was sentimental and passionate.
James Sefton realized that Lucia Catherwood was not merely a woman to be admired, but one to be loved and desired. She had appealed to him as one with whom to make a great career; now she appealed to him as a woman with whom to live. He remembered the story of her carrying the wounded Prescott off the battlefield in her arms and in the dark, alone and undaunted, amid all the dead of the Wilderness. She was tall and strong, but was it so much strength and endurance as love and sacrifice? He was filled with a sudden fierce and wild jealousy of Prescott, because, when wounded and stricken down, she had sheltered him within her arms.
His look again followed the curves of her noble face and figure, the full development of strong years, and a fire of which he had not deemed himself capable burned in the eyes of the Secretary. The pale shade of Helen Harley floated away in the mist, but Lucia met his silent gaze firmly, and again she asked in cold, level tones:
"Have you found such a woman?"