is that it is smaller and less attractive to the
vulgar eye than the common iris, of which I have a great number growing
at the end of the garden. Don't listen to Tina, my children, she's a
cynic, and no cynic can understand the philosophy of gardening. It was
one of the wisest of men, though a trifle unorthodox, I admit, who
advised us to cultivate our garden. A pessimist he may have been before
he took up the trowel, but a cynic--never."

"I am not complaining of the trowel, Theophilus," observed Mrs. Clay,
"though when it comes to that I don't see why a trowel and a bed of
roses is any more philosophic than a ladle and a kettle of pickles."

"Perhaps not, Tina, perhaps not," chuckled the doctor, "but yours is a
practical mind, and there's nothing, I've always said, like a practical
mind for seeing things crooked. It suits a crooked world, I suppose, and
that's why it usually manages to get on so well in it."

"And I'd like to know how you see things, Theophilus," sniffed Mrs.
Clay, whose temper was rising.

"I see them as they are, Tina, which isn't in the very least as they
appear," rejoined the good man, unruffled.

He bent forward, made a lunge with his trowel at a solitary blade of
grass growing in the bed of bleeding hearts, and after uprooting it,
returned with a tranquil face to his garden chair.

But Mrs. Clay, having, as he had said, a practical mind, merely sniffed
while she wiped off the small green table with a red-bordered napkin and
scattered the crumbs of sponge-cake to the greedy slate-coloured
pigeons.

"If I judged you by what you appear, Theophilus," she retorted,
crushingly, "I should have judged you for a fool on the day you were
born."

This sally, which was delivered with spirit, afforded the doctor an
evident relish.

"If you knew your Juvenal, my dear," he responded, with perfect good
humour, "you would remember: _Fronti nulla fides_."

Rising from his seat, he stooped fondly over the bed of bleeding hearts,
and gathering a few blossoms, presented them to Sally, with a courtly
bow.

"A favourite flower of mine. My poor mother was always very partial to
it," he remarked.

CHAPTER XXXII

I COME TO THE SURFACE

It was a bright June day, I remember, when I came to the surface again,
and saw clear sky for the first time for more than two years. I had
entered the office a little late, and the General had greeted me with an
outstretched hand in which I felt the grip of the