Colin II by E.F. Benson — Read

Colin woke from his siesta very gradually. He had not the slightest idea when the first faint glimmerings of consciousness began to return, where he was. He scarcely knew who he was, and with a deliberate quiescence of mind he tried to prolong this vague sense that what lay here was alive and happy, without orientating it or attaching it to any fixed point. Nirvana, he thought, must be like this, mere awareness of existence and content.

But this Nirvana began spontaneously to break up: from outside his window a whisper of wind and a stir of sun-winnowed air spiced with indefinable Southern odour flowed across to the bed where he lay in shirt and trousers, and at the end of his bed, very curiously, he saw two bare feet. It was still unconjecturable, to his drowsiness, to whom they belonged and what they were doing there, but now a fly settled on one of them, and he made the great discovery that it was his own foot which twitched to dislodge it. This snapped the chain of his identity round his neck and he knew he was Colin. Then the hot Southern scent and the whisper of wind in the pine outside localized him, for nowhere else, but in that beloved villa on Capri, did a pine whisper like that. Yes, he was in Capri: of course he was, for he had arrived late last night, and had spent the morning in the sea.