“Until that very moment when she was killed I believed we had still a chance of getting away,” he said.  “All through the night and morning that we sailed across the sea from Capri to Salerno, we talked of escape.  We were full of hope, and it clung about us to the end, hope for the life together we should lead, out of it all, out of the battle and struggle, the wild and empty passions, the empty arbitrary ‘thou shalt’ and ‘thou shalt not’ of the world.  We were uplifted, as though our quest was a holy thing, as though love for another was a mission . . . .

“Even when from our boat we saw the fair face of that great rock Capri—­already scarred and gashed by the gun emplacements and hiding-places that were to make it a fastness—­we reckoned nothing of the imminent slaughter, though the fury of preparation hung about in the puffs and clouds of dust at a hundred points amidst the gray; but, indeed, I made a text of that and talked.  There, you know, was the rock, still beautiful for all its scars, with its countless windows and arches and ways, tier upon tier, for a thousand feet, a vast carving of gray, broken by vine-clad terraces, and lemon and orange groves, and masses of agave and prickly pear, and puffs of almond blossom.  And out under the archway that is built over the Piccola Marina other boats were coming; and as we came round the cape and within sight of the mainland, another little string of boats came into view, driving before the wind towards the south-west.  In a little while a multitude had come out, the remoter just little specks of ultramarine in the shadow of the eastward cliff.

“‘It is love and reason,’ I said, ’fleeing from all this madness of war.’

“And though we presently saw a squadron of aeroplanes flying across the southern sky we did not heed it.  There it was—­a line of little dots in the sky—­and then more, dotting the south-eastern horizon, and then still more, until all that quarter of the sky was stippled with blue specks.  Now they were all thin little strokes of blue, and now one and now a multitude would heel and catch the sun and become short flashes of light.  They came, rising and falling and growing larger, like some huge flight of gulls or rooks or such-like birds, moving with a marvellous uniformity, and ever as they drew nearer they spread over a greater width of sky.  The southward wind flung itself in an arrow-headed cloud athwart the sun.  And then suddenly they swept round to the eastward and streamed eastward, growing smaller and smaller and clearer and clearer again until they vanished from the sky.  And after that we noted to the northward and very high Evesham’s fighting machines hanging high over Naples like an evening swarm of gnats.

“It seemed to have no more to do with us than a flight of birds.

“Even the mutter of guns far away in the south-east seemed to us to signify nothing . . .