They were, however, not betrothed when the war burst upon Europe, and
Henry, then one-and-twenty, went from the Officers' Training Corps to
the Fifth Devons, while his cousin became attached to the Red Cross and
nursed at Plymouth. The accident terminated their shadowy romance and
brought real love into the woman's life, while the man found his
hopes at an end. He was drafted to Mesopotamia, speedily fell sick of
jaundice, was invalided to India, and, on 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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