hurch 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.

The exercise indeed served to clear away the superficial irritations of
the morning, but he remained miserable. It seemed proved beyond a doubt
that Rachel was indifferent to him, for