But Hester walked homewards slowly and languidly, speaking no word.  Sylvia noticed this at first without venturing to speak, for Hester was one who disliked having her ailments noticed.  But after a while Hester stood still in a sort of weary dreamy abstraction; and Sylvia said to her,

‘I’m afeared yo’re sadly tired.  Maybe we’ve been too far.’

Hester almost started.

‘No!’ said she, ’it’s only my headache which is worse to-night.  It has been bad all day; but since I came out it has felt just as if there were great guns booming, till I could almost pray ’em to be quiet.  I am so weary o’ th’ sound.’

She stepped out quickly towards home after she had said this, as if she wished for neither pity nor comment on what she had said.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE RECOGNITION

Far away, over sea and land, over sunny sea again, great guns were booming on that 7th of May, 1799.

The Mediterranean came up with a long roar on a beach glittering white with snowy sand, and the fragments of innumerable sea-shells, delicate and shining as porcelain.  Looking at that shore from the sea, a long ridge of upland ground, beginning from an inland depth, stretched far away into the ocean on the right, till it ended in a great mountainous bluff, crowned with the white buildings of a convent sloping rapidly down into the blue water at its base.

In the clear eastern air, the different characters of the foliage that clothed the sides of that sea-washed mountain might be discerned from a long distance by the naked eye; the silver gray of the olive-trees near its summit; the heavy green and bossy forms of the sycamores lower down; broken here and there by a solitary terebinth or ilex tree, of a deeper green and a wider spread; till the eye fell below on the maritime plain, edged with the white seaboard and the sandy hillocks; with here and there feathery palm-trees, either isolated or in groups—­motionless and distinct against the hot purple air.

Look again; a little to the left on the sea-shore there are the white walls of a fortified town, glittering in sunlight, or black in shadow.

The fortifications themselves run out into the sea, forming a port and a haven against the wild Levantine storms; and a lighthouse rises out of the waves to guide mariners into safety.

Beyond this walled city, and far away to the left still, there is the same wide plain shut in by the distant rising ground, till the upland circuit comes closing in to the north, and the great white rocks meet the deep tideless ocean with its intensity of blue colour.