62“My mother died when I was a child, and I had no sister. My father failed in business when I was a lad of fourteen, and a godfather paid for my later education. Until I came to Grendon I had hardly ever spoken to a young lady of refinement. At once the Thatched House became to me what I had never known, a home, and its young mistress my—my ideal of womanhood.”

62

“I see,” said the other man, touched by the candid admissions. “Then I take it, Mr. Garlett, that yours was a love marriage?”

“In spite of my wife’s ill-health, and our disappointment at not having children, I doubt if any married folk ever led a happier and more placid existence than we did—till the war,” answered Harry Garlett earnestly, but, as the other thought, a little evasively.

“My wife took the greatest pride and pleasure in my success as a cricketer. Yet she was so far from strong that, even in the old days, she could seldom sit out a match.”

“I know that you were the third man in Terriford to join up in August, ’14,” observed Mr. Kentworthy, “but that, I take it, did not mean that you were not completely happy at home?”

“Indeed, it did not! I felt that every fit man, in a position to do so, ought to join up at once. As for my wife, she was one of those old-fashioned women who approve of everything their husbands do.”

“Very few of that sort about now,” said Mr. Kentworthy, smiling.

“Well, my wife was one of those few! I told her how I felt about it all, and she said no word to stop me. And yet I have every reason to believe that she went through a real martyrdom while I was at the front——” He waited a moment, then concluded: “And when the war came to an end, and I settled down at home again, I realized that she had become a permanent invalid.”

“A terrible thing for a man of your age,” observed Mr. Kentworthy thoughtfully.

Harry Garlett made no answer to that comment. Had he ever felt for poor Emily a tithe of what he now felt for the girl who was to become his wife to-morrow, the condition in which he had found her on his return home would indeed have been a terrible thing. But with Emily, his relations, 63though good, kindly, even in a sense, gratefully affectionate, had not been such, even before the war, as greatly to affect him. But that, after all, was entirely his own and most secret business.

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