She was sitting on the veranda waiting for her husband to come in for luncheon. The Malay boy had drawn the blinds when the morning lost its freshness, but she had partly raised one of them so that she could look at the river. Under the breathless sun of midday it had the white pallor of death. A native was paddling along in a dug-out so small that it hardly showed above the surface of the water. The colours of the day were ashy and wan. They were but the various tones of the heat. (It was like an Eastern melody which exacerbates the nerves by its ambiguous monotony.) The cicadas sang their grating song with frenzied energy ; it was as continual and monotonous as the rustling of a brook over the stones ; but on a sudden it was drowned by the loud singing of a bird ; mellifluous and rich ; and for an instant, with a catch at her heat, she t
hought
of the English blackbird.
Then she heard her husband?s step on the gravel path behind the bungalow, the path that led to the court-house in which he had been working, and she rose from her chair to greet him. He ran up the short flight of steps, for the bungalow was built on piles, and at the door the boy was waiting to take his topee. He came into the room which served them as a dinning-room and parlour, and his eyes lit up with pleasure as he saw her.
W.S. Maugham