The man introduced him into a spacious hall and closed the door, leaving him to his own reflections.  The place was very wide and high and without windows, but the broad daylight descended abundantly from above through the glazed roof and illuminated every corner.  He would have taken the room for a conservatory, for it contained a forest of tropical trees and plants, and whole gardens of rare southern flowers.  Tall letonias, date palms, mimosas and rubber trees of many varieties stretched their fantastic spikes and heavy leaves half-way up to the crystal ceiling; giant ferns swept the polished marble floor with their soft embroideries and dark green laces; Indian creepers, full of bright blossoms, made screens and curtains of their intertwining foliage; orchids of every hue and of every exotic species bloomed in thick banks along the walls.  Flowers less rare, violets and lilies of the valley, closely set and luxuriant, grew in beds edged with moss around the roots of the larger plants and in many open spaces.  The air was very soft and warm, moist and full of heavy odours as the still atmosphere of an island in southern seas, and the silence was broken only by the light plash of softly-falling water.

Having advanced a few steps from the door, the Wanderer stood still and waited, supposing that the owner of the dwelling would be made aware of a visitor’s presence and would soon appear.  But no one came.  Then a gentle voice spoke from amidst the verdure, apparently from no great distance.

“I am here,” it said.

He moved forward amidst the ferns and the tall plants, until he found himself on the farther side of a thick network of creepers.  Then he paused, for he was in the presence of a woman, of her who dwelt among the flowers.  She was sitting before him, motionless and upright in a high, carved chair, and so placed that the pointed leaves of the palm which rose above her cast sharp, star-shaped shadows over the broad folds of her white dress.  One hand, as white, as cold, as heavily perfect as the sculpture of a Praxiteles or a Phidias, rested with drooping fingers on the arm of the chair.  The other pressed the pages of a great book which lay open on the lady’s knee.  Her face was turned toward the visitor, and her eyes examined his face; calmly and with no surprise in them, but not without a look of interest.  Their expression was at once so unusual, so disquieting, and yet so inexplicably attractive as to fascinate the Wanderer’s gaze.  He did not remember that he had ever seen a pair of eyes of distinctly different colours, the one of a clear, cold gray, the other of a deep, warm brown, so dark as to seem almost black, and he would not have believed that nature could so far transgress the canons of her own art and yet preserve the appearance of beauty.  For the lady was beautiful, from the diadem of her red gold hair to the proud curve of her fresh young lips; from her broad, pale forehead, prominent and boldly modelled at the angles of the brows, to the strong mouldings of the well-balanced chin, which gave evidence of strength and resolution wherewith to carry out the promise of the high aquiline features and of the wide and sensitive nostrils.