Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/148

"I want to be in this thing———" Well, young Upsher had apparently been in it with a vengeance; but what he had cost Campton in cables to his distracted family, and in weary pilgrimages to the War Office, the American Embassy, the Consulate, the Prefecture of Police, and divers other supposed sources of information, the painter meant some day to tell his young relative in no measured terms. That is, if the chance ever presented itself; for, since he had left the studio that morning four months ago, Benny had so completely vanished that Campton sometimes wondered, with a little shiver, if they were ever likely to exchange words again in this world.

"Mayhew will know; he wants to tell me about the boy, I suppose," he mused.

Harvey Mayhew—Harvey Mayhew with a penstroke through the title which, so short a time since, it had been his chief ambition to display on his cards! No wonder it embarrassed him now. But where on earth had he been all this time? As Campton pondered on the card a memory flashed out. Mayhew? Mayhew? Why, wasn't it Mayhew who had waylaid him in the Crillon a few hours before war was declared, to ask his advice about the safest way of travelling to the Hague? And hadn't he, Campton, in all good faith, counselled him to go by Luxembourg "in order to be out of the way of trouble"?

The remembrance swept away the painter's sombre