Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/302

try again. There must be other surgeons . . . other ways. . ." he whispered.

"Oh, your surgeons . . . oh, your ways!" Campton sneered after him, in the same whisper.

From the room where he sat at the foot of George's glossy white bed, Campton, through the open door, could watch the November sun slanting down a white ward where, in the lane between other white beds, pots of chrysanthemums stood on white-covered tables.

Through the window his eyes rested incredulously on a court enclosed in monastic arches of grey stone, with squares of turf bordered by box hedges, and a fountain playing. Beyond the court sloped the faded foliage of a park not yet entirely stripped by Channel gales; and on days without wind, instead of the boom of the guns, the roar of the sea came faintly over intervening heights and hollows.

Campton's ears were even more incredulous than his eyes. He was gradually coming to believe in George's white room, the ward beyond, the flowers between the beds, the fountain in the court; but the sound of the sea still came to him, intolerably but unescapably, as the crash of guns. When the impression was too overwhelming he would turn away from the window and cast his glance on the bed; but only to find that the