A month after Gilbert and Ninian had left England, Henry went to London for a couple of days on business connected with his books. Mrs. Graham had asked him to return to Boveyhayne instead of going to Ireland, until he was fully well again, and he had gladly accepted her invitation. He had written a few pages of a new book that pleased him, and he was anxious to complete the story before he entered the Army. Writing irked him, but he could not abstain from writing ... some demon drove him to it, forcing him to his desk when all his desire was to be out in the lanes with Mary or sailing about the bay with Tom Yeo and Jim Rattenbury. There were times when he loathed this labour of writing which came between him and the pleasure of living, so that he sometimes saw foxgloves and bluebells and primroses and violets and wild daffodils, not as the careless beauty of a Devonshire lane, but as picturesque material for a description in one of his chapters. And his beastly creatures would not lie still in his study until he returned to attend to them, but insisted on following him wherever he went, thrusting themselves upon his notice continually, whether the time was opportune or not. He would walk with Mary, perhaps to Hangman's Stone, and suddenly he would hear her saying, "What are you thinking of, Quinny?" and he would come out of his silence with a start, and say, "Oh, my book, Mary!" and find that he had been walking by her side, unaware of her, unaware of anything but these abominable paper people who deluged his mind with their being ... and when they got to Hangman's Stone, he thought always, "What a good title for a story!"

"But I can't leave it alone," he would say to himself, and then he would compare himself to a drunkard, eager to be quit of his drink, but unable to conquer his craving. And he had pride in it, too. That was what distinguished him from the drunkard and the drug-taker. They had no pride in their drunkenness or their drugged senses, but he had pride in his books, and constantly in his mind was the desire that before he joined the Army, he should leave another book behind him, that his life should be expressed substantially in a number of novels, so that if he should die in battle, he would have left something by which men might remember him.

He had talked to Mary about his position, but she had insisted that this was a decision he must make for himself. Her view, and the view of her mother, was that a woman ought not to take the responsibility of urging a man to endure the horror and danger of such a war as this. "Women can't go into the trenches themselves," Mrs. Graham said, "and they've no right to ask any one else to go!" That was what his father had said.

"But somebody must go, and there are people who have to be told about things," he objected.

"I think," Mrs. Graham answered, "I'd rather be killed than be defended by a man who was white-feathered into doing it, and I know I should never be happy again if I'd nagged at a man until he joined the Army, and he was killed.... I think that some women will have haunted minds after this War!"

"It's the Government's job to say who shall go and who shall stay," Mary added. "That's what they're there for, and it's mean of them to shuffle out of their responsibility and let a lot of flappers and old maids do their work for them!"

Then their talk had taken a new turn, and in the end it was settled that Mary and he were to be married when the new book was finished, and then he would join the Army. There had been a difficulty with Mrs. Graham, but Mary over-ruled her.

"I won't let him go until he marries me," she said, shutting her lips firmly and looking very resolutely at her mother.

"Roger and I might go in together," Henry suggested. "I had a letter from him saying he thought he would join soon. Rachel's going to live in the country...."

"She can come here if she likes," Mrs. Graham interjected. "You'd better tell her that when you go to town. She can stay with us until the war's over...."

"There's the baby, of course!" Henry reminded her.

"I know," she answered. "I'd like to hear a baby in this house again...."