well dressed for a hot climate, and rather elaborate in his manner, to a very persuasive shop-keeper.  Meanwhile, as he sat looking at them, he was entangled in the Thornburys and Miss Allan, who, after hovering about for a minute or two, settled in chairs round him, holding their cups in their hands.  They wanted to know whether he could tell them anything about Mr. Bax.  Mr. Thornbury as usual sat saying nothing, looking vaguely ahead of him, occasionally raising his eye-glasses, as if to put them on, but always thinking better of it at the last moment, and letting them fall again.  After some discussion, the ladies put it beyond a doubt that Mr. Bax was not the son of Mr. William Bax.  There was a pause.  Then Mrs. Thornbury remarked that she was still in the habit of saying Queen instead of King in the National Anthem.  There was another pause.  Then Miss Allan observed reflectively that going to church abroad always made her feel as if she had been to a sailor’s funeral.

There was then a very long pause, which threatened to be final, when, mercifully, a bird about the size of a magpie, but of a metallic blue colour, appeared on the section of the terrace that could be seen from where they sat.  Mrs. Thornbury was led to enquire whether we should like it if all our rooks were blue—­“What do you think, William?” she asked, touching her husband on the knee.

“If all our rooks were blue,” he said,—­he raised his glasses; he actually placed them on his nose—­“they would not live long in Wiltshire,” he concluded; he dropped his glasses to his side again.  The three elderly people now gazed meditatively at the bird, which was so obliging as to stay in the middle of the view for a considerable space of time, thus making it unnecessary for them to speak again.  Hewet began to wonder whether he might not cross over to the Flushings’ corner, when Hirst appeared from the background, slipped into a chair by Rachel’s side, and began to talk to her with every appearance of familiarity.  Hewet could stand it no longer.  He rose, took his hat and dashed out of doors.

Chapter XVIII

Everything he saw was distasteful to him.  He hated the blue and white, the intensity and definiteness, the hum and heat of the south; the landscape seemed to him as hard and as romantic as a cardboard background on the stage, and the mountain but a wooden screen against a sheet painted blue.  He walked fast in spite of the heat of the sun.

Two roads led out of the town on the eastern side; one branched off towards the Ambroses’ villa, the other struck into the country, eventually reaching a village on the plain, but many footpaths, which had been stamped in the earth when it was wet, led off from it, across great dry fields, to scattered farm-houses, and the villas of rich natives.  Hewet stepped off the road on to one of these, in order to avoid the hardness and heat of the main road, the dust of which was always being raised in small clouds by carts and ramshackle flies which carried parties of festive peasants, or turkeys swelling unevenly like a bundle of air balls beneath a net, or the brass bedstead and black wooden boxes of some newly wedded pair.