~Odd. An odd night. Carrying some dying soldier back to an empty house.~

~Strange duty killing men whose names you do not know.~

~He did not dare to question what he was doing. Start to question it and he might find himself gazing through a tear in the skin of the world.~

~He should try to set her mind at ease, though he had no real sense of how to do it and was aching with tiredness. Why had he not stayed in a hotel or a lodging house? Family always saw too much.~

~Tea, the proper making of it, the knowledgeable enjoyment, was, like British sea power, a mystery a foreigner could only gaze upon, awed and confused, an idiot at High Mass.~

~He wanted to build a city in her head.~

~Do drowned men have headstones?~

~Was love, once given, always possessed? A gift, a quality, you could scatter over your head like sacred ashes when you had need of it?~