Thomas Hardy.
It was five months later, the middle of February. Annette was lying in a deck-chair by the tank in the shade of the orange trees. All was still, with the afternoon stillness of Teneriffe, which will not wake up till sunset. Even the black goats had ceased to bleat and ring their bells. The hoopoe which had been saying Cuk—Cuk—Cuk all the morning in the pepper tree was silent. The light air from the sea, bringing with it a whiff as from a bride's bouquet, hardly stirred the leaves. The sunlight trembled on the yellow stone steps, and on the trailing, climbing bougainvillea which had flung its mantle of purple over the balustrade. Through an opening in a network of almond blossom Annette could look down across the white water-courses and green terraces to the little town of Santa Cruz, lying glittering in the sunshine, with its yellow and white and mauve walls and flat roofs and quaint cupolas, outlined as if cut out in white paper, sharp white against the vivid blue of the sea.
A grey lizard came slowly out of a clump of pink verbena near the tank, and spread itself in a patch of sunlight on a little round stone. Annette, as she lay motionless with thin folded hands, could see the pulse in its throat rise and fall as it turned its jewelled eyes now to this side, now to that, considering her as gravely as she was considering it.
A footfall came upon the stone steps. The lizard did not move. It was gone.
Mrs. Stoddart, an erect lilac figure under a white umbrella, came down the steps, with a cup of milk in her hand. Her forcible, incongruous countenance, with its peaked, indomitable nose and small, steady, tawny eyes under tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of having been knocked to pieces at some remote period and carelessly put together again. No feature seemed to fit with any other. If her face had not been held together by a certain shrewd benevolence which was spread all over it, she would have been a singularly forbidding-looking woman.
Annette took the cup and began dutifully to sip it, while Mrs. Stoddart sat down near her.
"Do you see the big gold-fish?" Annette said.
Her companion put up her pince-nez and watched him for a moment, swimming lazily near the surface.
"He seems much as usual," she said.