another woman----"

"Mr. Sefton! You proposed that we understand each other, and that is
just what I wish, too. You have been watching me all this time."

"Watching you! Yes, I have, and to purpose!" exclaimed the Secretary.
"You have done few things in Richmond that have not come to my
knowledge. Again I ask you what kind of a man do you think I am? When I
saw you standing in my path I resolved that no act of yours should
escape me. You know of this spy, Lucia Catherwood, and you know where
she is. You see, I have even her name. Once I intended to arrest her and
expose you to disgrace, but she had gone. I am glad now that we did not
find her. I have a better use for her uncaught, though it annoys me that
I cannot yet discover where she was when we searched that house."

The cold chill which he had felt before in the presence of this man
assailed Prescott again. He was wholly within his power, and
metaphorically, he could be broken on the wheel if the adroit and
ruthless Secretary wished it. He bit his dry lip, but said nothing,
still waiting for the other.

"I repeat that I have a better use for Miss Catherwood," continued Mr.
Sefton. "Do you think I should have gone to all this trouble and touched
upon so many springs merely to capture one misguided girl? What harm can
she do us? Do you think the result of a great war and the fate of a
continent are to be decided by a pair of dark eyes?"

They were walking now along a half-made street that led into the fields.
Behind them lay the city, and before them the hills and the forest, all
in a robe of white. Thin columns of smoke rose from the earthworks,
where the defenders hovered over the fires, but no one was near enough
to hear what the two men said.

"Then why have you held your hand?" asked Prescott.

"Why?" and the Secretary actually laughed, a smooth, noiseless laugh,
but a laugh nevertheless, though so full of a snaky cunning that
Prescott started as if he had been bitten. "Why, because I wished you,
Robert Prescott, whom I feared, to become so entangled that you would
be helpless in my hands, and that you have done. If I wish I can have
you dismissed from the army in disgrace--shot, perhaps, as a traitor. In
any event, your future lies in the hollow of my hand. You are wholly at
my mercy. I speak a word and you are ruined."

"Why not speak it?" Prescott asked calmly. His first impulse had passed,
and though his tongue was dry in his mouth the old hardening