The
beginnings of a garden were spread out before them, with young fruit
trees and flowering shrubs, and bushes of pale pink roses. Exuberant
tropical growths were interspersed with carefully tended vestiges of
plants that had evidently been brought from a more temperate climate, and
had not borne the transition well. Bushes and trees and shrubs spread
away for some distance, to where the ground rose in a small hillock and
then fell away abruptly into bare hillside.

"In all this garden that you see," said the Englishwoman, "there is one
tree that is sacred."

"A tree?" said the Frenchman.

"A tree that we could not grow in England."

The Frenchman followed the direction of her eyes and saw a tall, bare
pole at the summit of the hillock. At the same moment the sun came over
the hilltops in a deep, orange glow, and a new light stole like magic
over the brown landscape. And, as if they had timed their arrival to
that exact moment of sunburst, three brown-faced boys appeared under the
straight, bare pole. A cord shivered and flapped, and something ran
swiftly up into the air, and swung out in the breeze that blew across the
hills--a blue flag with red and white crosses. The three boys bared
their heads and the small girl on the verandah steps stood rigidly to
attention. Far away down the hill, a young man, cantering into view
round a corner of the dusty road, removed his hat in loyal salutation.

"That is why we live out here," said the Englishwoman quietly.

CHAPTER XVII: THE EVENT OF THE SEASON

In the first swelter room of the new Osmanli Baths in Cork Street four or
five recumbent individuals, in a state of moist nudity and
self-respecting inertia, were smoking cigarettes or making occasional
pretence of reading damp newspapers. A glass wall with a glass door shut
them off from the yet more torrid regions of the further swelter
chambers; another glass partition disclosed the dimly-lit vault where
other patrons of the establishment had arrived at the stage of being
pounded and kneaded and sluiced by Oriental-looking attendants. The
splashing and trickling of taps, the flip-flap of wet slippers on a wet
floor, and the low murmur of conversation, filtered through glass doors,
made an appropriately drowsy accompaniment to the scene.

A new-comer fluttered into the room, beamed at one of the occupants, and
settled himself with an air of elaborate languor in a long canvas chair.
Cornelian Valpy wa