He had stayed week after week and Mary would have been a fool not to see that he was waiting for the favourable moment to ask her to marry him. How long had he been in love with her? Looking back, she thought it was ever since she was fifteen, when he had come home on leave and found her no longer a child but a young girl. It was rather touching, that long fidelity. And of course there was a difference between the girl of nineteen, the man of forty-three; and the woman of thirty, the man of fifty-four
