"No; you don't understand. There's something strong about her. What she says might really matter, I think, to a cleverer man than I. She knows men, and then, Valentine, there's something else."
He stopped. There was a queer look of mystery in his face.
"Something else! What is it? What can there be?"
"I saw the flame as if it was burning in her eyes."
Valentine made an abrupt movement. It might have been caused by surprise, annoyance, anger, or simply by the desire to fidget which overcomes every one, not paralyzed, at some time or another. His action knocked over a chair, and he stooped to pick it up and set it in its place before he spoke. Then he said:
"The flame, you say! What on earth is your theory about this extraordinary flame? You seem to attach a strange importance to it. Yet it can only be the fire of a fancy, a jet from the imagination. Tell me, have you any theory about it, honestly? and if so, what is it?"
Julian was rather taken aback by this very sledgehammer invitation. Hitherto the flame, and his thought of it, had seemed to have the pale vagueness and the mystery of a dream. When the flame appeared, it is true, he was oppressed by a sense of awe; but the awe was indefinite, blurred, resisting analysis, and quite inexplicable to another.
"I did not say I had any theory about it," he answered.
"But then, why do you consider it at all? And why seem to think that its supposed presence in the eyes of a woman makes that woman in any way different from others?"
"But I did not say I thought so," Julian said, rather hastily. "How you jump to conclusions to-day!"