scenes; and when they reached their sitting-room George went straight out onto the terrace, and leaning on the parapet, called back: “Oh, don’t go to bed yet—it’s too jolly.”

Campton followed, and the two stood looking down on the festal expanse of the Place de la Concorde strown with great flower-clusters of lights between its pearly distances. The sky was full of stars, pale, remote, half-drowned in the city’s vast illumination; and the foliage of the Champs Elysées and the Tuileries made masses of mysterious darkness behind the statues and the flashing fountains.

For a long time neither father nor son spoke; then Campton said: “Are you game to start the day after to-morrow?”

George waited a moment. “For Africa?”

“Well—my idea would be to push straight through 39to the south—as far as Palermo, say. All this cloudy watery loveliness gives me a furious appetite for violent red earth and white houses crackling in the glare.”

39

George again pondered; then he said: “It sounds first-rate. But if you’re so sure we’re going to start why did you tell Fortin to bring that girl to-morrow?”

Campton, reddening in the darkness, felt as if his son’s clear eyes were following the motions of his blood. Had George suspected why he had wanted to ingratiate himself with the physician?

“It was stupid—I’ll put her off,” he muttered. He dropped into an armchair, and sat there, in his clumsy infirm attitude, his arms folded behind his head, while George continued to lean on the parapet.

The boy’s question had put an end to their talk by baring the throbbing nerve of his father’s anxiety. If war were declared the next day, what did George mean to do? There was every hope of his obtaining his discharge; but would he lend himself to the attempt? The deadly fear of crystallizing his son’s refusal by forcing him to put it into words kept Campton from asking the question.

IV

The evening was too beautiful, and too full of the sense of fate, for sleep to be possible, and long after George had finally said “All the same, I think I’ll turn in,” his father sat on, listening to the 40gradual subsidence of the traffic, and watching the night widen above Paris.

40

As he sat there, discouragement overcame 

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