Nothing for her and John and Gwinnie but field work; the farm had spoiled them incurably for life indoors.  But it had hardened their muscles and their nerves, it had fitted them for the things they would have to do.  The things they would have to see.  There would be blood; she knew there would be blood; but she didn’t see it; she saw white, very white bandages, and greyish white, sallow-white faces that had no features that she knew.  She hadn’t really thought so very much about the war; there had been too many other things to think about.  Their seven weeks’ training at Coventry, the long days in Roden and Conway’s motor works, the long evenings in the ambulance classes; field practice in the meadow that John’s father had lent to the Red Cross; runs along the Warwickshire roads with John sitting beside her, teaching her to steer and handle the heavy ambulance car.  An endless preparation.

And under it all, like a passion, like a hidden illness, their impatience, their intolerable longing to be out there.

If there had been nothing else to think about there was John.  Always John.  Not that you could think about him without thinking about the war; he was so thoroughly mixed up with it; you couldn’t conceive him as left out of it or as leaving himself out.  It had been an obsession with him, to get into it, to get into it at once, without waiting.  That was why there was only four of them.  He wouldn’t wait for more volunteers.  They could get all the volunteers they wanted afterwards; and all the cars, his father would send out any number.  She suspected John of not really wanting the volunteers, of not even wanting Gwinnie and Dr. Sutton.  She could see he would have liked to have gone with her alone.  Queer, that so long as she had thought he would be going without her, she had been afraid; she had felt certain he would be killed or die of wounds.  The one unbearable thing was that John should die.  But after it had been settled that she was to go with him as his chauffeur she hadn’t been afraid any more.  It was as if she knew that she would keep him safe.  Or perhaps all the time she had been afraid of something else.  Of separation.  She had had visions of John without her in another country; they were coloured, vaguely, with the horror of her dreams.  It had been just that.  Anyhow, she hadn’t thought any more about John’s dying.

It was the old man, his father, who had made her think of it now.

She could see him, the grey, kind, silent man, at the last minute, standing on the quay and looking at John with a queer, tight look as though he were sorry about something—­oh, but unbearably sorry about something he’d thought or said or done.  He was keeping it all in, it was a thing he couldn’t speak about, but you could see it made him think John wasn’t coming back again.

He had got it into his head that she was going out because of John.  She remembered, before that, his kind, funny look at her when he said to John, “Mind you take care of her,” and John’s “No fear,” and her own “That’s not what he’s going out for.”  She had a slight pang when she thought of John’s father.  He had been good to Gwinnie and to her at Coventry.