There was no more life to be seen in that hot little room, even by one fixed in an optimistic pose. He emerged into the sitting-room, and through an opposite and open door he could see the pink dressing-gown, containing his landlady, heaving sleepily under a mosquito net. One of her bare feet was drooping under the net. At this he had to swallow down London again violently, and remember that he was Seeing Life, and that he was Luckier than Most. Did you know that the surest way of ensuring luck is to be sure that you are lucky? “Now I will find my suffragette,” he said, standing between the bamboos at the gate. And he expelled an entering misgiving that he was perhaps presuming on his luck. It was curiously cool in the shade of the high cactus hedge that ran along one side of the way. A fresh breeze, like the unbidden guest at the wedding, conscious that it was not attired in character, crept guiltily in from the sea. The sun, which would have disclaimed even distant relationship with the cool copper halfpenny that inhabits English skies, fretted out the black shadows across and across the white street. The gardener thought painfully of many glasses of cold water that he had criminally wasted in England. He stiffened his long upper lip, and tried to look for new worlds instead of remembering the old. He went into the Botanical Gardens, and sat on a seat opposite the mad orchids. I think the Almighty was a little tired of His excellent system by the time He came to the orchids, so He allowed them to fashion themselves. For they are contrived, I think, and not spontaneously created like the rest. On the other end of the seat were two children, so blessedly English that for a moment the gardener smelt Kensington Gardens. The girl wore very little between her soft neck and her long brown arms and legs, except a white frill or two, and a passion flower in her sash. The boy, more modest, was encased in a white sailor suit. Both were finished off at the feet with sandals. Hardly had the gardener sat down when he was regretfully aware that he had sat by mistake on a pirate-ship in mid-ocean. The two commanders looked coldly at him from their end of the treasure-laden deck, and there was an awkward silence which somehow left the impression that much exciting talk had immediately preceded it on that vessel. “I beg your pardon,” said the gardener. “I forgot to tell you that I am the prisoner you seized when you captured your last prize. There was a desperate resistance, but in spite of heavy odds, you overcame me.” The boy, because he was a boy, looked for a second towards his mahogany-coloured Nana, who was staring an orchid out of countenance farther up the path. The girl, because she was a girl, looked neither right nor left, but straight at the gardener, and said: “All right then. But you mustn’t let your feet dangle into the sea. And you must be very frightened.”