works included a piano concerto, withdrawn after its first performance, a light orchestral suite, The B's, portraying three of his friends at the college (Arthur Bliss, Arthur Benjamin, and Francis Purcell "Bunny" Warren), and the Three Dances for violin and orchestra. More typical of the works with which Howells was later to be associated were his earliest important compositions for organ, the first set of Psalm Preludes (1915–16) and the first of the op. 17 Rhapsodies. Howells' promise seemed likely to be cut short in 1915 when he was diagnosed with Graves' disease and given six months to live. His poor health prevented him from being conscripted in World War I, arguably preserving him from the worse fate awaiting Gurney and others of his friends and contemporaries. At St Thomas' Hospital he was given the previously untried treatment of radium injections in the neck, administered twice a week over a period of two years. For much of this time Howells travelled between London for treatment and Lydney where he was nursed by his mother. He was nonetheless still able to compose and in 1916 produced the first work of his maturity. The Piano Quartet in A minor, dedicated to "the hill at Chosen and Ivor Gurney who knows it" was in the following year one of the first works published under the auspices of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust. In the following year Howells became assistant organist at Salisbury Cathedral, but held the post for only a few months, finding the repeated journeys to London for treatment too difficult. Friends then arranged for a grant from the Carnegie Trust, which paid for Howells to assist R. R. Terry in editing the Latin Tudor repertoire that Terry and his choir were reviving at Westminster Cathedral. The work was to lead to a multi-volume edition of Tudor Church Music by OUP in the 1920s. It provided Howells with a comfortable income and enabled him to absorb the English Renaissance style which he loved and would evoke in his own music. His first significant works for choir, the Three Carol-Anthems (Here is the Little Door, A Spotless Rose and Sing Lullaby) were written around this time. Marriage and teaching In 1920 Howells married Dorothy Eveline Goozee (1891–1975), informally adopted daughter of John and Alma Dawe. Dorothy was a singer whom he had met in 1911 when deputising as her accompanist. The marriage endured