He did not think of Claire until he stood on deck and saw the lights receding and the shadow that was England passing out of his sight.
He remembered her then with a little pang of joy—for suddenly he knew that he was free to think of her.
He had thought of her before as a man registers a fact that is always present to him, but in the interval since he had seen her his consciousness of her had been increasingly troubled.
Now the trouble was fading, as England faded, as his old life was fading.
He had a sense that he was finally freed. It was not like seeing Claire again, but it was like not having to see anything else.
"Until I'm dead I'm hers, and after I'm dead I'm hers, so that's all right," he said to himself. "I haven't got to muddle things up any more."
The sea lay around them at dawn like a sheet of pearl—it was very empty but for the gulls' wings beating to and fro out of the mist.
Winn had lived through many campaigns. He had known rough jungle tussles in mud swamps, maddened by insects, thirst, and fever; he had fought in colder, cleaner dangers down the Khyber Pass, and he had gone through the episodic scientific flurries of South Africa; but France disconcerted him; he had never started a campaign before in a country like a garden, met by welcoming populations, with flowers and fruit.
It made him feel sick. The other places were the proper ones for war.
It was not his way to think of what lay before him. It would, like all great emergencies, like all great calamities, keep to its moment, and settle itself. Nevertheless he could not free his mind from the presence of the villages—the pleasant, smiling villages, the little church towers in the middle, the cobbled streets, the steep-pitched, gray roofs and the white sunny walls.