A stage-coach went past us going in the opposite direction towards Chichester and the guard on the back blew his horn merrily as he saw me. I turned the collar of the jacket up against the cooler evening air. It was not cold, but I was icy inside. The jacket could not warm me. I saw my hands were trembling slightly on the reins and I looked at them carefully until they were steady. To our left, low on the horizon, a single pinprick of light shone very white and clear in the evening sky. I stared at it, and it seemed to stare back at me.

It mattered very little which way I took. It suited my whim to turn Sea’s head towards the star which looked as icy and as cold as I felt inside. As it grew darker I saw that the lane was climbing, up to the crest of a hill. There was a sweet light singing all around us. Sea walked softly, his head up, snuffing at the air as if the chalk grass smelled good to him. It was quiet and dusky and he was unafraid, though his ears raked our surroundings for sounds of danger. I gave a solitary little chuckle at the thought of fear. Fear of living, fear of falling, fear of dying.

All gone.

I had achieved a state of absolute confidence. At last I had nothing left to lose, and the little girl who had looked at the ceiling above her bunk and known herself to have only one good thing in her life was now a woman with nothing. I felt gutted of love, of life, of tenderness. I felt clear and simple. I was as clean and cold as a freezing stream or like a chalk rock face with a sheen of ice on it.

The road was heavily wooded; under the trees the blackness of the evening was thick and blinding. Sea walked as if he were balancing on eggshells, his ears went forward and back, his head turned so that he could look everywhere. I slumped in the saddle as if I were a squire who had been hunting all day. I was bone weary. I even dozed as we went quietly up that lane; Sea’s hooves made no sound on the pine needles and the mud. I only wakened when we came out from under the trees at the crest of the hill and found we were in the light of the rising half-moon.

I rubbed my eyes. We had climbed to a great rolling sweep of hills which had risen softly up from the coast. Now we were clear of the dark pine and budding beech trees the grass was short and sweet, cropped by sheep. Three or four of them scuttered out of our way as we came out of the wood. Little lambs scampering behind, butting at their mothers in their nervousness.