They were one of her
favorite winter flowers, and he had had these sent out to her this
afternoon from a hothouse of the distant town by a half-frozen
messenger. Near her head curtains of crimson brocade swept down the
wall to the floor from the golden-lustred window cornices. At her back
were cushions of crimson silk. At the other end of the sofa her piano
stood and on it lay the music she played of evenings to him, or played
with thoughts of him when she was alone. And other music also which
she many a time read; as Beethoven's Great Nine.
Now, along this wall of the parlor from window curtain to window
curtain there stretched a festoon of evergreens and ribands put there
by the children for their Christmas-Night party; and into this festoon
they had fastened bunches of mistletoe, plucked from the walnut tree
felled the day before--they knowing nothing, happy children!
There she reclined.
The lower outlines of her figure were lost in a rich blackness over
which points of jet flashed like swarms of silvery fireflies in some
too warm a night of the warm South. The blackness of her hair and the
blackness of her brows contrasted with the whiteness of her bare arms
and shoulders and faultless neck and faultless throat bared also.
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