Except for the boat, of course ... What of the boat? It was matchwood already amongst those devilish rocks to the eastward.
"That was a nearish squeak," he murmured softly as he rose, and limping a little, sought shelter among the clefts of the cliff from the blinding torrents of rain.
An hour or so afterwards, however, having with easy grace and some small knowledge of Turkish and modern Greek hired a gaily caparisoned mule from a neighbouring farmer, he rode up the Knights' Street quite cheerfully, dried and warmed by the sun, which, after the brief storm, had shone out again radiantly, carelessly.
He had settled what the valentine was to be from the very moment that the idea of it had entered his head, but it took him fully half an hour to see it safely through the hands of the Turkish officials, and then they charged him for a message in cipher.
Yet it was only a very simple quotation:--
'Haply I think on thee, and then my state;
Like to the lark at break of day uprising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate.'
He did not even put his name to it, for it seemed impossible to him that she should not know who sent it.
By this time it was close on four o'clock, and he computed the difference in longitude by his watch.
"She ought to get it at latest by four," he said to himself as he strolled off to the old church to live awhile amongst the ghosts of the Crusaders and the Knights Hospitalliers of St. John.
As a matter of fact it was a quarter to four when the brick-dust coloured envelope was put into Aura's hands, but she was still looking at it with a certain scare in her eyes and a certain flutter at her heart when Ted came down from her grandfather's room at four o'clock. Of course she knew who had sent it. No one but Ned would have thought of anything at once so consoling and so disturbing. To rise from earth and "sing hymns at heaven's gate" was quite in order; but how about the "Haply I think on thee"?