The last time they saw each other was in 1946. He was in his Navy blues, boarding a bus in Houston. She was a young, pretty thing saying goodbye to her first love.

"I got on the bus, blew her a kiss, and I was shipped out," says Rolland Moulton, 85, a South Florida retiree. "I never saw her again."

It was a spring and summer romance, and Mabel Sepulvado, 83, can rattle off the months. "We dated all of March, April, May, June, July and then August," she says.

Mabel was 17, a fresh high-school graduate whose father could afford to send her to college. He was a 19-year-old from rural Maine who had been drafted a couple years earlier in the thick of war.

The initial sparks flew at a Houston diner. As the months passed, they’d take a walk in the park or get something to eat or go to the movies to beat the summer heat. The city teemed with young servicemen. The country brimmed with promise. And the couple only had eyes for each other.

Rolland doesn’t remember where his orders were sending him the day he boarded that bus. But he remembers the letter Mabel sent him that fall.

"I told him that I loved him dearly, but we would have to discontinue our relationship," says the former Mabel Lee Braswell. "My father said if we didn’t quit our correspondence, he would cut off my money for college."

She was an only child, and her parents didn’t want her marrying a boy from Maine. "I could understand that," she says now. "Maine was awful far away."

Mabel and Rolland exchanged a few more letters, but each of them moved on, and within the decade, they’d fallen in love again, settling into long, happy marriages.

Mabel and her husband, Lawrence Sepulvado, a construction engineer, were together 58 years, raising a son and then a granddaughter in Houston before he died in 2007.

Rolland moved back to his tiny town of Emden, Maine, where he worked for the school district and he and his wife, Lydia, raised their daughter.

"Mom and I were the center of his existence," says daughter Deborah Hiett, who eventually moved to Palm Beach County to teach. "For my dad, family was everything."

When his wife was diagnosed with cancer about 15 years ago, Rolland bought a retirement place in West Palm Beach so they’d be closer to their daughter and better doctors. When Lydia died in May 2008, they’d been married 55 years.

For Rolland, the emptiness was gripping. He’d drive to the library, do the grocery shopping, watch the planes fly overhead en route to the airport.

"It was a pretty lonely life," he says.

And then, one day last summer, everything changed. All because of a picture.

For years, Mabel Sepulvado had kept a photograph of 19-year-old Rolland Moulton. She didn’t pine over it. She didn’t pull it out and reminisce. But it was always there, somewhere.

"My husband told me, ’You can keep that picture or you can throw it in the garbage.’ So I kept it."

Why?

"I don’t know," she says. "I guess it was because I cared about him so much."

With her husband gone, Mabel decided it was time to downsize. She and granddaughter Tyler, 16, who had lived with her since a car accident involving Tyler’s mother, began cleaning. And there it was.

"I laid the picture on the bar and let it sit there for about a month," Mabel said.

“My granddaughter saw the picture and she said, ‘Oh Grandma. He’s real cute. Why don’t we see if I can find him on the computer?’ She’s always on that computer.”