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