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Miss Anthony had taken her usual armchair. It was placed, as the armchairs of elderly ladies usually are, with its high back to the light, and Campton could no longer observe the discrepancy between her words and her looks. This probably gave her laugh its note of confidence. "My dear, if you were to cut me open George's name would run out of every vein," she said.

"But in that tone—it was your tone. You thought he'd been—that something had happened," Campton insisted. "How could it, where he is?"

She shrugged her shoulders in the "foreign" way she had picked up in her youth. The gesture was as incongruous as her slang, but it had become part of her physical self, which lay in a loose mosaic of incongruities over the solid crystal block of her character.

"Why, indeed? I suppose there are risks everywhere, aren't there?"

"I don't know." He pulled out the letter he had received that morning. A sudden light had illuminated it, and his hand shook. "I don't even know where George is any longer."

She seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then asked calmly: "What do you mean?"

"Here—look at this. We're to write to his base. I'm to tell his mother of the change." He waited, cursing the faint winter light, and the protecting back of her chair. "What can it mean," he broke out, "except that he's left Sainte-Menehould, that he's been sent