May evening the three had been out on some such expedition; the
country side still looked gray and bare, though the leaves were
showing on the willow and blackthorn and sloe, and by the tinkling
runnels, making hidden music along the copse side, the pale delicate
primrose buds were showing amid their fresh, green, crinkled leaves.
The larks had been singing all the afternoon, but were now dropping
down into their nests in the pasture fields; the air had just the
sharpness in it which goes along with a cloudless evening sky at
that time of the year.

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