am-stuff,
but eternal and enduring. It is the centre of my life, and
all other things about it are subordinate or altogether vain. I
loved her, that woman of a dream. And she and I are dead together!

"A dream! How can it be a dream, when it drenched a living
life with unappeasable sorrow, when it makes all that I have lived
for and cared for, worthless and unmeaning?

"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