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by his not having yet been able to learn the details of George's wounding. After a week during which the boy had hung near death, the great surgeon—returning to Doullens just as Campton had finally ceased to hope for him—had announced that, though George's state was still grave, he might be moved to a hospital at the rear. So one day, miraculously, the perilous transfer had been made, in one of Mrs. Brant's own motor-ambulances; and for a week now George had lain in his white bed, hung over by white-gowned Sisters, in an atmosphere of sweetness and order which almost made it seem as if he were a child recovering from illness in his own nursery, or a red-haired baby sparring with dimpled fists at a new world.

In truth, Campton found his son as hard to get at as a baby; he looked at his father with eyes as void of experience, or at least of any means of conveying it. Campton, at first, could only marvel and wait; and the isolation in which the two were enclosed by George's weakness, and by his father's inability to learn from others what the boy was not yet able to tell him, gave a strange remoteness to everything but the things which count in an infant's world: food, warmth, sleep. Campton's nearest approach to reality was his daily scrutiny of the temperature-chart. He studied it as he used to study the communiqués which he now no longer even thought of.

Sometimes when George was asleep Campton would