"Why? Just because you had been thinking about it? I don't see that. If the wind blew here, it would be odder that it didn't blow when I was sitting over there."
"But did you know I had been thinking about it?"
"Well, it seemed likely. Let's have another swim before we dress. There's trouble coming in the sky. It's the last of the serene days for the present."
"But there was a high barometer this morning."
"There won't be when we get up to the Villa again," he said. "The sun has got the central-heating touch to-day. It's been stuffy heat for the last hour, not the heat of the fire. And look at the sky."
Certainly a curious change had taken place all over the firmament. It was as if some celestial painter had put body-colour into what had been a wash of pure blue; there was a certain white opacity mingled with the previous clarity of it. The sun itself, too, was a little veiled, and its heat, as Francis had said, seemed more like the radiation from hot-water pipes than the genial glow of an open fire. Round it at a distance of three or four of its diameters ran a pale complete halo, as of mist. Yet what mist could live in such a burning and be unconsumed?
"'Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,'"
quoted Francis. "But here we have the two things occurring simultaneously, which Shakespeare did not mean. But what, after all, didn't Shakespeare mean?"
We swam out round the fat German's promontory, floated, drifting with the eastward setting current, came lazily in again, and even more lazily walked up through the narrow cobbled path to where the rickety little victoria was waiting for us on the road. The tourist boat had arrived, and clouds of dust hung in the air, where their vehicles had passed, undispersed by any breeze. The intolerable oppression of the air was increasing every moment; the horse felt himself unable to evolve even the semblance of a trot, and the driver, usually the smartest and most brisk of charioteers, sat huddled up on his box, without the energy to crack his whip or encourage his steed to a livelier pace. Usually he sits upright and sideways, with bits of local news for his passengers, and greetings for his friends on the road; to-day he had nothing beyond a grunt of salutation, and a shrug of the shoulders for the tip which he usually receives with a wave of his hat, and a white-toothed "Tante grazie!" The Piazza, usually a crowded cheerful sort of outdoor club at midday, was empty, but for a few exhausted individuals who sat in the strips of narrow shadow, and the post-office clerk just chucked our letters and papers at us. The approach of Scirocco, though as yet no wind stirred, made everyone cross and irritable, and set every nerve on edge, and from the kitchen, when we arrived at the Villa, we heard sounds of shrill altercation going on between Pasqualino and Seraphina, a thing portentously unusual with those amicable souls. Pasqualino banged down the macaroni on the table, and spilt the wine and frowned and shrugged till Francis told him abruptly to mend his manners or let Seraphina serve us; on which for a moment the sunny Italian child looked out from the clouds and begged pardon, and said it was not he but the cursed Scirocco. And then, following on the cloud in the sky that had spread so quickly over the heavens, came the second cloud.
Francis had just opened the Italian paper which we had got at the post-office and gave one glance at it.