She returned his look with a tearful simplicity: she hardly seemed to comprehend what he was saying. “But my son! I want _news_ of my son, real news; I want a letter; I want to see some one who has seen him! To touch a hand that has touched him! Oh, don’t you understand?”
“Yes, I understand,” he said; and she took up her desperate litany, clinging about him with soft palms like medusa-lips, till by dint of many promises he managed to detach himself and steer her gently to the door.
On the threshold she turned to him once more. “And your own son, Juanito—I know he’s at the front again. His mother came the other day—she often comes. And I can promise you things if you’ll help me. No, even if you don’t help me—for the old days’ sake, I will! I know secrets ... magical secrets that will protect him. There’s a Moorish salve, infallible against bullets ... handed down from King Solomon ... I can get it....”
Campton, guiding her across the sill, led her out and bolted the door on her; then he went back to his easel and stood gazing at the sketch of George. But the spell was broken: the old George was no longer there. The war had sucked him back into its awful whirlpool—once more he was that dark enigma, a son at the front....
In the heavy weeks which followed, a guarded allusion of Campton’s showed him one day that Boylston was aware of there being “something between” George and Madge Talkett.
“Not that he’s ever said anything—or even encouraged me to guess anything. But she’s got a talking face, poor little thing; and not much gift of restraint. And I suppose it’s fairly obvious to everybody—except perhaps to Talkett—that she’s pretty hard hit.”
Boylston’s round face became remote and mysterious. “We don’t really know—do we, sir?—exactly how any of them feel? Any more than if they were——” He drew up sharply on the word, but Campton faced it.
“Transfigured, say; no, trans——what’s the word in the theology books? A new substance ... somehow....”
“Ah, you feel that too?” the father exclaimed.
“Yes. They don’t know it themselves, though—how far they are from us. At least I don’t think they do.”
Campton nodded. “But George, in the beginning, was—frankly indifferent to the war, wasn’t he?”