Page:The One Woman (1903).pdf/33

 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!"

His wife opened the door for him in silence.

"Who was that woman, Frank?" she asked at length, her long, dark lashes blinking rapidly.

"What woman, Ruth?"

"The beauty I saw glide softly into your study."

Gordon smiled as he sank into a chair in the library.

"Miss Kate Ransom, a stranger I never met before."