“He was.”
“Oh, so you've got him back! You're lucky. Is he wounded or has he got a staff job in England?”
“He'll never come back.”
He paused in what he was doing and sat gazing into the flames which were licking at the wood. He hung his head. He ought to have thought of that; in the last few years so many Englishmen were dead. And then there came another reflection—the picture of what it must have cost her husband to say good-bye to his wife and children, and go marching away to anonymous glory. He wasn't married himself, but if he had been... It took enough bolstering up of one's courage to go when one was single; but to go when one was married... And yet selfishly, ever since he had put on khaki his paramount regret had been that, were he to peg out, he would leave no one to carry on in his stead. This air-raid was his first remote taste of warfare; within the next few weeks he was to know it in its full fury. What had impressed him most was the difference between war as imagined and witnessed. As imagined it had seemed the most immense of sports; as witnessed it was merely murder. Just before he had sought shelter he had seen where a bomb had fallen. People had been killed—people not so different from the mother and children hiding in this house. The suddenness of extinction had made him feel that in the game of life he had somehow “missed out.” There would be no woman to think of him as “her man” were he to go west. And here was the woman's price for such caring, “He'll never come back.”
He turned his head slowly; by the light of the crackling wood for the first time he saw her. The little boy was lying wearied out, with his head bowed in her lap. The little girl sat drowsing against her shoulder.
She herself was leaning forward, gazing at and beyond him with a curious air of resigned intensity. She seemed to him to be listening for someone, whom she knew in her heart was never coming. He noticed the white half-moon of her shoulders faintly showing beneath her chinchilla wrap. He noticed her string of perfect pearls, the single ring on her hand and the expensive simplicity of her velvet gown. He was sufficiently a man of the world to make a guess at her social station. But it wasn't her beauty or elegance that struck him, though they were strangely in contrast to the empty room in which she sat; it was her gentleness and expression of patient courage. He knew, as surely as if she had told him, that this empty room, in which he had found her, was the symbol of her days. It was with her as it was with himself; there was no man to whom she was “his woman.”
“I've hurt you by the impertinence of my questions.”
She smiled and shook her head. “You've not hurt me. Don't think that. I shouldn't like you to think that you'd hurt me or anything that would make you sad. Are you going to France soon?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Then you won't be here for Christmas. I wonder where you'll spend it. Perhaps next Christmas the war will be ended and you'll...” She caught the instant change in his expression. She had seen that look too often in soldiers' eyes when the future was mentioned not to know what it meant. She laid her hand on his arm impulsively. “But everyone who goes doesn't stay there. You'll be one of the lucky ones. You'll come back. I have that feeling about you. I know what's in your mind; you're a long way from home, you're going to face a great danger and you believe that everything is ended. You can only think of war now, but there are so many better things to do with life than fighting. All the better things will be here to welcome you, when you return.”