He had announced his marriage to her in a short note containing hardly any particulars--except that his wife was a student like himself, and that he intended to live abroad and work.

Some four years later, the _Times_ contained the bare news, in the obituary column, of his wife's death, and about a year afterwards he returned to England, an enormously changed man, with that slight lameness, which seemed somehow to draw a sharp, dividing line between the splendid, impulsive youth who had gone abroad, and the reserved, and self-contained man of thirty-two--pessimist and dilettante--who had returned.

His lameness he ascribed to an accident in the Alps, but would never say anything more about it; and his friends presently learned to avoid the subject, and to forget the slight signs of something unexplained which had made them curious at first.
In the intervening years before the war, Cynthia felt tolerably sure that she had been his only intimate woman friend.

His former susceptibility seemed to have vanished.

On the whole he avoided women's society.