Who could say? The next instant, with his boots kicked off, and the thwart, on which he had kept an eye this while past, held under his arm-pits by his outstretched arms, as a buoy, he had leapt into the roller as it lifted the boat. The water felt warm to him, spray and wind-chilled as he was; warm, but rough, as it seized him, ducked him, cuffed him, bruised him; all but broke him, ere with a mighty rush it flung him forwards. Ye gods! what it was not to be quite sound--to have an arm that could not stand a strain! Still that awful something against which he had struck in the downdraw had been warded off somehow and ... Then once more the following roller, stronger of the giant twins which hunt the wide wastes of water in couples, overtook him, caught him, buffeted him, knocked him senseless, so, with a wild shrieking scramble of pebbles and coral sand, swept him up to the very last corner of the creek. His head, as he lay stunned, was within an inch of a jagged needle-point of rock which would have crashed into his skull as if it had been an egg-shell. It was full five minutes ere another giant wave reached out for him and felt him about the feet. But by this time that was enough to rouse him. He stirred, sat up, and half-mechanically withdrew himself stiffly beyond any further touch. He was bleeding from cuts in the hands and on his knees; but that seemed to be all the damage done. 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.