I found that after four days in Rome I was free (except for a wallet of papers which required attention), to go wherever I pleased for the inside of a week, and you may judge where next the train took me. That morning I had sent to Francis news of my escape from Rome (how desirous "an escape from Rome" would have sounded a month ago), and the same evening, across the flames of the sunset, I saw the peaks and capes of the island, shaped like a harp lying on its back, grow from dimmest outline of dream-shape into distinctness again. There on the left was the lower horn of it, plunged into the sea; then came the inward curve, sloping downwards to the grey cluster of the town, where the fingers of the player would be, and it swelled upwards again into the larger horn which formed the top of it. Never for more than a moment, I think, did my eyes leave some part of that exquisite shape. How often in the lower horn of it had Francis and I sat perched on that little platform by the gilded statue of Our Lady, looking landwards across the blue plain of sea towards the streamer of smoke from the truncated volcano, or to the coastland northwards, where the port was whitely strung like a line of pearls along the shore of the bay. Just below the other horn is the divinest bathing-place that the world holds; on a rock a hundred yards from the shore there is a little cave, curtained by seaweed, and in it is a tin box where shall be found two cigarettes and matches to match. Those were to have been lit and smoked within two months of their concealment there, and that date has now long been buried beneath the three years' landslide of war. The matches will certainly be a mildewed fricassée of wood pulp and phosphorus, the cigarettes an almost more ignoble glue of paper and tobacco; but to-morrow morning I swear that Francis and I will swim there, and unearth the remains of the serene days before the war, and recapture the _feel_ that there was in the world before the Prussian centipede went forth on his doomed errand. Francis, I know, will hate swimming so early in the year as this, for he is a midsummer bather; but surely one who has been through the horrors of Gallipoli and earned the V.C. in France will not absolutely refuse to go through this ordeal by water for the sake of the recovery of the peace-cache. If it is possible to feel certain of anything, it is that to-morrow morning, whatever the weather, two futile Englishmen, as happy as they are silly, will swim out to the rock below the higher horn of the harp, and verify the existence of a tin box.