returning to the front, saw
service against the Turks. But chance willed that he won no distinction.
He did his duty under dreary circumstances, while to his hatred of war
was added the weight of his loss when he heard that Mary had fallen
in love. He was an ingenuous, kindly youth--a typical Lennox, who had
developed an accomplishment at Harrow and suffered for it by getting
his nose broken when winning the heavy-weight championship of the public
schools in his nineteenth year. In the East he still boxed, and after
his love story was ended, the epidemic of poetry-making took Henry also,
and he wrote a volume of harmless verse, to the undying amazement of his
family.

For Mary Lennox the war had brought a sailor husband. Captain Thomas
May, wounded rather severely at Jutland, lost his heart to the plain
but attractive young woman with a fine figure who nursed him back to
strength, and, as he vowed, had saved his life. He was an impulsive man
of thirty, brown-bearded, black-eyed, and hot-tempered. He came from a
little Somerset vicarage and was the only son of a clergyman, the
Rev. Septimus May. Knowing the lady as "Nurse Mary" only, and falling
passionately in love for the first time in his life, he proposed on the
day he was allowed to sit up, and since Mary Lennox shared his emotions,
also for the first time, he was accepted before he even knew her name.

It is impossible to describe the force of love's advent for Mary Lennox.
She had come to believe herself as vaguely committed to her cousin, and
imagined that her affection for Henry amounted to as much as she was
ever likely to feel for a man. But reality awakened her, and its glory
did not make her selfish, since her nature was not constructed so to
be; it only taught her what love meant, and convinced her that she could
never marry anybody on earth but the stricken sailor. And this she knew
long before he was well enough to give a sign that he even appreciated
her ministry. The very whisper of his voice sent a thrill through her
before he had gained strength to speak aloud. And his deep tones, when
she heard them, were like no voice that had fallen on her ear till then.
The first thing that indicated restoring health was his request that his
beard might be trimmed; and he was making love to her three days after
he had been declared out of danger. Then did Mary begin to live, and
looking back, she marvelled how horses and dogs and a fishing-rod had
been her life t