looked
back to make sure that Clotilde was not watching her. That others had
noticed her here and there she did not care; that was something beauty
would have to endure, and it only made her smile to herself.

"Everybody sees I am from the country--walking on the street without a
waiting-maid."

A boy passed, hushing his whistle, and gazing at the lone lady until his
turning neck could twist no farther. She was so dewy fresh! After he had
got across the street he turned to look again. Where could she have
disappeared?

The only object to be seen on the corner from which she had vanished was
a small, yellow-washed house much like the one Aurora occupied, as it
was like hundreds that then characterized and still characterize the
town, only that now they are of brick instead of adobe. They showed in
those days, even more than now, the wide contrast between their homely
exteriors and the often elegant apartments within. However, in this
house the front room was merely neat. The furniture was of rude, heavy
pattern, Creole-made, and the walls were unadorned; the day of cheap
pictures had not come. The lofty bedstead which filled one corner was
spread and hung with a blue stuff showing through a web of white
needlework. The brazen feet of the chairs were brightly burnished, as
were the brass mountings of the bedstead and the brass globes on the
cold andirons. 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. The united grace and pride of her movement was
inspiring but--what shall we say?--feline? It was a femininity without
humanity,--something that made her, with all her superbness, a creature
that one would want to find chained. It was the woman who had