She began by rather boring her daughter, Eva, about her new patient—his extreme gratitude, his charming ways and thoughts, his true gentleness of nature, his delightful views, the niceness of his mind, the likeableness of him. . . . She wondered aloud as to whether he had a mother—she must be a very nice woman. She wondered in silence as to whether he had a wife—she must be a very happy woman. . . . How old was he? . . . It was so hard to tell with these poor fellows, brought in so wasted with fever and dysentery; and rank wasn’t much guide to age nowadays. He might be. . . . Well—he’d be up and gone before long, and she’d never see him again, so what was the good of wondering. . . . And she continued to wonder. . . . And then, from rather boring Miss Stayne-Brooker with talk about Lieutenant Greene she went to the extreme, and never mentioned him at all.
For, one day, with an actual gasp of horrified amazement, she found that she had suddenly realised that possibly the poets and novelists were not so wrong as she had believed, and that there might be such a thing as the Love—they hymned and described—and that Peace and Happiness might be its inseparable companions. . . . She would read her Browning, Herrick, Swinburne, Rosetti again, her Dante, her Mistral, and some of those plays and poems of Love that the world called wonderful, beautiful, true, for she had an idea that she might see glimmerings of wonder, beauty and truth in them—now. . . .
But then—how absurd!—at her age. Of course she would not read them again! At her age! . . .
And proceeded to do so at her Dangerous Age. . . .
Strange that his name should be Green or Greene—he was the fifth person of that name whom she had met since she left Major Walsingham Greene, eighteen years ago. . . .
CHAPTER II
Love
All too soon for two people concerned, Doctor Mowbray, the excellent Civil Surgeon of Mombasa, in whose hospital Bertram was, decided that that young gentleman might forthwith be let loose on ticket-of-leave between the hours of ten and ten for a week or two, preparatory to his discharge from hospital for a short spell of convalescence-leave before rejoining his regiment. . . .
“I’ll call for you and take you for a drive after lunch,” said Mrs. Stayne-Brooker, “and then you shall have tea with me, and we’ll go over to the Club and sit on the verandah. You mustn’t walk much, your first day out.”
“I’m going to run miles,” said Bertram, smiling up into her face and taking her hand as she stood beside his chair—a thing no other patient had dared to do or would have been permitted to do. (“He was such a dear boy—one would never dream of snubbing him or snatching away a hand he gratefully stroked—it would be like hitting a baby or a nice friendly dog. . . .”)
“Then you’ll be ill again at once,” rejoined Mrs. Stayne-Brooker, giving the hand that had crept into hers a little chiding shake.