George, with a sudden blush, took his hand in a long pressure.
“I say, Dad—Madge has told me. Told me that you know about us and that you’ve persuaded her to see things as I do. She hadn’t had a chance to speak to me of your visit till last night.”
Campton felt his colour rising; but though his own part in the business still embarrassed him he was glad that the barriers were down.
“I didn’t want,” George continued, still flushed and slightly constrained, “to say anything to you about all this till I could say: ‘Here’s my wife.’ And now she’s promised.”
“Thanks to you, you know. Your visit to her did it. She told me the whole thing yesterday. How she’d come here in desperation, to ask you to help her, to have her mind cleared up for her; and how you’d thought it all over, and then gone to see her, and how wise and perfect you’d been about it all. Poor child—if you knew the difference it’s made to her!”
They were seated now, the littered table between them. Campton, his elbows on it, his chin on his hands, looked across at his son, who faced the light.
“The difference to you too?” he questioned.
George smiled: it was exactly the same detached smile which he used to shed on the little nurse who brought him his cocoa.
“Of course. Now I can go back without worrying.” He let the words fall as carelessly as if there were nothing in them to challenge attention.
“Go back?” Campton stared at him with a blank countenance. Had he heard aright? The noise of a passing lorry suddenly roared in his ears like the guns of the front.
George opened his blue eyes wide. “Why, of course; as soon as ever I’m patched up. You didn’t think——?”
“I thought you had the sense to realize that you’ve done your share in one line, and that your business now is to do it in another.”
The same detached smile again brushed George’s lips. “But if I happen to have only one line?”
“Nonsense! You know they don’t think that at the War Office.”
“I don’t believe the War Office will shut down if I leave it.”
“What an argument! It sounds like——” Campton, breaking off on a sharp breath, closed his lids for a second. He had been gazing too steadily into George’s eyes, and now at last he knew what that mysterious look in them meant. It was Benny Upsher’s look, of course—inaccessible to reason, beyond reason, belonging to other spaces, other weights and measures, over the edge, somehow, of the tangible calculable world....