That was why, having got rid of the committee of exasperating buffoons, he was now prolonging breakfast far beyond the usual hour.  The meal was over at last; and still he felt disinclined to move.  Those people had disquieted his composure with their mephitic rant about philanthropy; they had almost succeeded in spoiling his morning.  And now this funeral!  Would he go into the house and do some reading or write a few letters?  No.  He could not write letters just them.  He was not feeling sufficiently Rabelaisian.  Epicurus was his God for the moment.  In a mood of heathen wistfulness he lit a cigar and leaned back in the chair trying to recapture his serenity.

It was his favourite corner of the domain—­a kind of projecting spur or platform shaded by a few grandiose umbrella pines.  Near at hand, on a slightly lower level, rose a group of flame—­like cypresses whose shapely outlines stood out against the sea, shining far below like a lake of pearl.  The milky sheen of morning, soon to be dispelled by the breeze, still hung about the water and distant continent—­it trembled upon the horizon in bands of translucent opal.  His eye roved round the undulating garden, full of sunlight and flowers and buzzing insects.  From a verbena hard by came the liquid song of a blackcap.  It gave him pleasure; he encouraged the blackcaps, delighting in their music and because they destroyed the spiders whose troublesome webs were apt to come in contact with his spectacles.  The gardeners had severest instructions not to approach their nests.  It was one of the minor griefs of his life that, being so short-sighted, he could never discover a bird’s nest; no, not even as a child.  Memories of boyhood began to flit through his mind; they curled upwards in the scented wreaths of his Havana. . . .

The golden oriole’s flute-like whistle poured down from some leafy summit in a sudden stream of melody.  A hurried note, he thought; expressed without much feeling—­from duty rather than inclination; not like the full-throated ease of other orioles in other lands he knew.  And so were the nightingales.  They profited by his hospitality for a day or two and then, uttering a perfunctory little tune, some breathless and insincere word of thanks—­just like any human visitor—­betook themselves elsewhere, northwards.

Northwards!

He glanced into the mazy foliage of the pine tree overhead, out of which a shower of aromatic fragrance was descending to mingle with the harsher perfume of the cypress.  How they changed their faces, the conifers—­so fervent and friendly at this hour, so forbidding at nighttime!  Rifts of blue sky now gleamed through its network of branches; drenched in the sunny rays, the tree seemed to shudder and crackle with warmth.  He listened.  There was silence among those coralline articulations.  Soon it would be broken.  Soon the cicada would strike up its note in the labyrinth of needles—­annual signal for his own departure from Nepenthe.  He always waited for the first cicada.