memories were always so precise, should not remember where; and then his pencil stopped. What he had really thought was: “Like the 54effigy of a young knight”—though he had instinctively changed the word as it formed itself. He leaned in the doorway, the sketch-book in hand, and continued to gaze at his son. It was the clinging sheet, no doubt, that gave him that look ... and the white glare of the electric burner.

54

If war came, that was just the way a boy might lie on a battle-field-or afterward in a hospital bed. Not his boy, thank heaven; but very probably his boy’s friends: hundreds and thousands of boys like his boy, the age of his boy, with a laugh like his boy’s.... The wicked waste of it! Well, that was what war meant ... what to-morrow might bring to millions of parents like himself.

He stiffened his shoulders, and opened the sketch-book again. What watery stuff was he made of, he wondered? Just because the boy lay as if he were posing for a tombstone!... What of Signorelli, who had sat at his dead son’s side and drawn him, tenderly, minutely, while the coffin waited?

Well, damn Signorelli—that was all! Campton threw down his book, turned out the sitting-room lights, and limped away to bed.

55

V

The next morning he said to George, over coffee on the terrace: “I think I’ll drop in at Cook’s about our tickets.”

George nodded, munching his golden roll.

“Right. I’ll run up to see mother, then.”

His father was silent. Inwardly he was saying to himself: “The chances are she’ll be going back to Deauville this afternoon.”

There had not been much to gather from the newspapers heaped at their feet. Austria had ordered general mobilisation; but while the tone of the despatches was nervous and contradictory that of the leading articles remained almost ominously reassuring. Campton absorbed the reassurance without heeding its quality: it was a drug he had to have at any price.

He expected the Javanese dancer 

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