She looked at him curiously.
“Then I don’t feel so badly, now that I know my idea was not incipient insanity,” she said, smiling. “I’ve quite made up my mind to send back to Kentucky for my forgotten church-letter. I’ve seen all fashionable society in New York can offer and I am weary of its vacuity. I’ve been disillusioned of a girl’s silly dreams, but there are some beautiful ones in my heart I’ve held. I can’t tell you how your church and work have thrilled and interested me. I have never heard such sermons and prayers as yours. You give to the old faiths new and beautiful meaning. Every word you have spoken has seemed to me a divine call.”
“And you cannot know how cheering such a message is to me to-night,” he thoughtfully replied, studying her carefully.
“I never could summon courage to come up and speak to you before, but your sermon this morning swept me off my feet. It was so simple, so heartfelt, so sincere, and yet so close in its touch of life, I felt that you had opened your very soul for me to see my own in its experiences. It will be a turning point in my life.”
She spoke with a quiet seriousness, and Gordon felt that he had never seen a face of such exquisite grace.
With a promise that he would call to see her within the week, she left.
He stood for a moment gazing at her name, “Miss Kate Ransom,” on the card she gave him, his mind aglow with the consciousness of her remarkable beauty, the famous Kentucky type, and yet a distinct variation.
Her figure was full and magnificent in the ripe glory of youth, a delicate face, the blonde’s colour, thick, waving auburn hair that seemed brown till the light blazed through its deep red tints, violet-blue eyes, cordial and smiling, at once mysterious, magic, friendly, gravely candid. Her skin was smooth as a babe’s, with the delicate creamy satin of the blonde flashing the scarlet tints of every emotion. Her lips were cherry-red, and as she listened they half parted with a lazy suggestion of tenderness and love; while the face was one of refined mentality, as unconscious as a child’s of its splendid beauty.
Her gait was proud and careless, telling of perfect health and stores of untouched vital powers, a movement of the body at once strong, luxurious, insolently languid, rhythmic and full of dumb music. It was when she moved that she expressed the consciousness of power, a gleam of cruelty, a challenge that was to man an added charm.
“What a woman!” he exclaimed aloud, as he drew on his coat. “The kind of a woman who enraptures the senses, drugs the brain and conscience of the man who responds to her call—the woman about whom men have never been able to compromise, but have always killed one another!”