"You haven't brought your overcoat."
"Never mind that."
"I do mind."
His robust appearance—his broad back and shoulders, thick vigorous neck and swarthy skin—only magnified his pathos in her eyes. It was pitiful that this great thing should be so frail.... He could pick her up with both hands on her waist, and hold her up before him, the big Joanna—and yet she must take care of him.
§17
An hour's walking brought them to the end of the Ness—to a strange forsaken country of coastguard stations and lonely taverns and shingle tracks. The lighthouse stood only a few feet above the sea, at the end of the point, and immediately before it the water dropped to sinister, glaucous depths.
"Well, it ain't much to see," said Joanna.
"It's wonderful," said Martin—"it's terrible."
He stood looking out to sea, into the Channel streaked with green and grey, as if he would draw France out of the southward fogs. He felt half-way to France ... here on the end of this lonely crane, with water each side of him and ahead, and behind him the shingle which was the uttermost of Kent.
"Joanna—don't you feel it, too?"