But as for going out because of John, whether he went or not she would have had to go, so keen that she hated those seven weeks at Coventry, although John had been there.

With every thud of the engines her impatience was appeased.

And all the time she could hear Gwinnie’s light, cool voice explaining to Dr. Sutton that the British Red Cross wouldn’t look at them and their field ambulance, but the Belgians, poor things, you know, weren’t in a position to refuse.  They would have taken almost anything.

Her mind turned to them:  to Gwinnie, dressed in their uniform, khaki tunic and breeches and puttees, her fawn-coloured overcoat belted close round her to hide her knees.  Gwinnie looked stolid and good, with her face, the face of an innocent, intelligent routing animal, stuck out between the close wings of her motor cap and the turned-up collar of her coat.  She would go through it all right.  Gwinnie was a little plodder.

She would plod through the war as she had plodded through her training, without any fear of tests.

And Dr. Sutton.  From time to time she caught him looking at her across the deck.  When Gwinnie’s talk dropped he made no effort to revive it, but stood brooding; a square, thick-set man.  His head leaned forward a little from his heavy shoulders in a perpetual short-sighted endeavour to look closer; you could see his eyes, large and clear under the watery wash of his glasses.  His features, slightly flattened, were laid quietly back on his composed, candid face; the dab of docked moustache rising up in it like a strange note of wonder, of surprise.

There, he was looking at her again.  But whether he looked or listened, or stood brooding, his face kept still all the time, still and sad.  His mouth hardly moved as he spoke to Gwinnie.

She turned from him to the contemplation of their fellow passengers.  The two Belgian boy scouts in capes and tilted caps with tassels bobbing over their foreheads; they tramped the decks, seizing attention by their gay, excited gestures.  You could see that they were happy.

The group, close by her in the stern, establishing itself there apart, with an air of righteous possession:  five, six, seven men, three young, four middle-aged, rather shy and awkward, on its fringe.  In its centre two women in slender tailor-made suits and motor veils, looking like bored uninterested travellers used to the adventure.

They were talking to a little man in shabby tweeds and an olive-green velvet hat too small for his head.  His smooth, innocent pink face carried its moustache like an accident, a mistake.  Once, when he turned, she met the arched stare of small china-blue eyes; it passed over her without seeing, cold, dreamy, indifferent.

She glanced again at his women.  The tall one drew you every time by her raking eyes, her handsome, arrogant face, the gesture of her small head, alert and at the same time set, the predatory poise of an enormous bird.  But the other one was—­rather charming.  Her features had a curious, sweet bluntness; her eyes were decorations, deep-set blue in the flushed gold of her sunburn.  The little man straddled as he talked to them, bobbing forward now and then, with a queer jerking movement from his hips.