Curtains of blue and white hung at the single window.

The floor, from habitual scrubbing with the common weed which politeness has to call _Helenium autumnale_, was stained a bright, clean yellow.
On it were, here and there in places, white mats woven of bleached palmetto-leaf.

Such were the room's appointments; there was but one thing more, a singular bit of fantastic carving,--a small table of dark mahogany supported on the upward-writhing images of three scaly serpents.
Aurora sat down beside this table.

A dwarf Congo woman, as black as soot, had ushered her in, and, having barred the door, had disappeared, and now the mistress of the house entered.
February though it was, she was dressed--and looked comfortable--in white.

That barbaric beauty which had begun to bud twenty years before was now in perfect bloom.