Campton looked away, and his eye, straying over the crowd, lit on the long heavy face of Fortin-Lescluze, seated with a group of men on the other side of the garden.

Why had it never occurred to him before that if there was one being in the world who could get George discharged it was the great specialist under whose care he had been?

“Suppose war does come,” the father thought, “what if I were to go over and tell him I’ll paint his dancer?” He stood up and made his way between the tables.

Fortin-Lescluze was dining with a party of jaded-looking politicians and journalists. To reach him Campton had to squeeze past another table, at which a fair worn-looking lady sat beside a handsome old man with a dazzling mane of white hair and a Grand Officer’s rosette of the Legion of Honour. Campton bowed, and the lady whispered something to her companion, who returned a stately vacant salute. Poor old Beausite, dining alone with his much-wronged and 34all-forgiving wife, bowing to the people she told him to bow to, and placidly murmuring: “War—war,” as he stuck his fork into the peach she had peeled!

34

At Fortin’s table the faces were less placid. The men greeted Campton with a deference which was not lost on Mme. Beausite, and the painter bent close over Fortin, embarrassed at the idea that she might overhear him. “If I can make time for a sketch—will you bring your dancing lady to-morrow?”

The physician’s eyes lit up under their puffy lids.

“My dear friend—will I? She’s simply set her heart on it!” He drew out his watch and added: “But why not tell her the good news yourself? You told me, I think, you’d never seen her? This is her last night at the ‘Posada,’ and if you’ll jump into my motor we shall be just in time to see her come on.”

Campton beckoned to George, and father and son followed Fortin-Lescluze. None of the three men, on the way back to Paris, made any reference to the war. The physician asked George a few medical questions, and complimented him on his look of recovered health; then the talk strayed to studios and theatres, where Fortin-Lescluze firmly kept it.

The last faint rumours of the conflict died out on the threshold of the “Posada.” It would have been hard to discern, in the crowded audience, any appearance but that of ordinary pleasure-seekers momentarily stirred by a new sensation. Collectively, fashionable 35Paris was already away, at the seashore or 

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