Had he gone out to Australia burdened with a girl-wife, the difficult struggle would have been well-nigh intolerable, and it was a million to one chance that he would ever have met the man to whom he owed his present good fortune.

What he now longed to do was to enjoy himself in a simple, straightforward way.

Love, with its tremors, uncertainties, its blisses and torments, was not for him, and in so far as he might want a pleasant touch of half sentimental, half sexless comradeship, there was his agreeable friendship with Mrs.Crofton.
Enid Crofton?
The thought of how well he had come to know her in the last three weeks surprised him.

When he had first met her in Egypt she had been the young, very pretty wife of Colonel Crofton, an elderly "dug-out," odd and saturnine, whose manner to his wife was not always over-kindly.

No one out there had been much surprised when she had decided to brave the submarine peril and return to England.
Radmore had not been the only man who had felt sorry for her, and who had made friends with her.