Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/131

Suddenly they lit on a short paragraph: "Fallen on the Field of Honour." One had got used to that with the rest; used even to the pang of reading names one knew, evoking familiar features, young faces blotted out in blood, young limbs convulsed in the fires of that hell called "the Front." But this time Campton turned pale and the paper fell to his knee.

"Fortin-Lescluze; Jean-Jacques-Marie, lieutenant of Chasseurs à Pied, gloriously fallen for France. . ." There followed a ringing citation.

Fortin's son, his only son, was dead.

Campton saw before him the honest bourgeois dining-room, so strangely out of keeping with the rest of the establishment; he saw the late August sun slanting in on the group about the table, on the ambitious and unscrupulous great man, the two quiet women hidden under his illustrious roof, and the youth who had held together these three dissimilar people, making an invisible home in the heart of all that publicity. Campton remembered his brief exchange of words with Fortin on the threshold, and the father's uncontrollable outburst: "For his mother and myself it's not a trifle—having our only son in the war."

Campton shut his eyes and leaned back, sick with the memory. This man had had a share in saving George; but his own son he could not save.

"What's the matter?" Miss Anthony asked, her hand on his arm.