The memory of Mr. Rust’s remark, however, kept the gardener for some moments busy being incurious. He was not altogether successful in his pose, for when the pallid owner of the Red Place stepped out of a thicket in front of him, he thought with a secret quiver, “Now I shall know what it was....” “Taking a morning walk—what?” remarked Mr. Rust, achieving his ambition, the commonplace, for once in perfection. “No,” replied the gardener (one who never told a lie unless he was posing as a liar), “I was leaving you. I have left a smile of thanks and a halfpenny on your plate. You know I’m a rover, an incurable vagabond, and my fraternity never disappears in an ordinary way in the station fly.” It is rather tiresome to have to explain one’s poses. It is far worse than having to explain one’s witticisms, and that is bad enough. “Come back to breakfast,” said Samuel. “I can let you into a much more paying concern than vagabondage.” It is not in the least impressive to disappear by brute force in public, so the gardener turned back. The gods did not run out to meet the returning vagabond, as they had run out to meet him arriving. The gardener did not look for them. He was too much occupied in thinking of small cramping things like “paying concerns.” The expression sounded to him like a foggy square room papered in a drab marbled design. “A paying concern does not interest me at all,” he said, feeling rather noble. “It won’t as long as you’re a merry vagabond. But your situation as such is not permanent, I think. Wouldn’t you like to go and strike attitudes upon the sea?” The gardener was intensely interested in what followed. Mr. Samuel Rust was penniless, owing, as he frankly admitted, to propensities which he shared with the common sieve. But in other directions he was well supplied with blessings. He had, for instance, a mother. And the mother—well, you know, she managed to scrape along on nine thousand a year—what? The said mother, excellent woman though she was, had refused to finance the Red Place. She had not come within the radius of its blessing. She had no idea that it was under the direct patronage of the gods, and that it promised a fortune in every facet. Samuel had explained these facts to her, but she had somehow gathered the impression that he was not unbiassed. In her hand she held the life of the Red Place, and at present held it checked. A little money for advertisement, a few hundred pounds to set the heart of the place beating, and Samuel Rust saw himself a successful man, standing with his gods on terms of equality. But his mother had become inaccessible, she had in fact become so wearied by the conversation of Samuel upon the subject that she had made arrangements to emigrate to Trinity Islands, somewhere on the opposite side of the world.