The Grey Room | Page 2

health,
good temper, and great wealth, judged existence a desirable thing and
quite easy to conduct with credit. "You only want patience and a
brain," he always declared. Sir Walter wore an eyeglass. He was
growing bald, but preserved a pair of grey whiskers still of respectable
size. His face, indeed, belied him, for it was moulded in a stern pattern.
One had guessed him a martinet until his amiable opinions and easy -
going personality were mainfested. The old man was not vain; he knew
that a world very different from his own extended round about him. But
he was puzzle-headed, and had never been shaken from his life-long
complacency by circumstances. He had been disappointed in love as a
young man, and only married late in life. He had no son, and was a
widower - facts that, to his mind, quite dwarfed his good fortune in
every other respect. He held the comfortable doctrine that things are
always levelled up, and he honestly believed that he had suffered as
much sorrow and disappointment as any Lennox in the history of the
race.
His only child and her cousin, Henry Lennox, had been brought up
together and were of an age - both now twenty - six. The lad was his
uncle's heir, and would succeed to Chadlands and the title; and it had
been Sir Walter's hope that he and Mary might marry. Nor had the
youth any objection to such a plan. Indeed, he loved Mary well enough;
there was even thought to be a tacit understanding between them, and
they grew up in a friendship which gradually became ardent on the
man's part, though it never ripened upon hers. But she knew that her
father keenly desired this marriage, and supposed that it would happen
some day.
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.
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