Page:Far from the Maddening Girls.djvu/109



Four days later arrived a number of pansy and heliotrope plants, which were duly bedded, and passed into a long and painful decline on the following afternoon. The rest was a matter of seeds, which I am constrained to believe were inadvertently planted upside down, and will some day make beautiful the gardens of Hong Kong. Certain it is that they never came my way.

A more bitter disappointment I have never experienced. Having no idea of the length of time necessary for germination I did not cease to expect the arrival of my unknown flowers until late in the following autumn. It was not until the first snow fell that I forever lost my faith in florists.

This fiasco also I reported to Miss Berrith.

“And so,” I said, “it seems I am to have no flowers, after all.”

“It is the first, and, let us hope, not the greatest of the disappointments of ‘Sans Souci,’” she answered.