Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/317

Campton remembered with a faint inward amusement that, in spite of her foreign bringing-up, and all her continental affinities, Julia had remained as implacably and incuriously Protestant as if all her life she had heard the Scarlet Woman denounced from Presbyterian pulpits. At another time it would have amused him to ponder on this one streak in her of the ancestral iron; but now he wanted only to console her.

"Oh, no—it was just the accident of the priest's being there. One of our chaplains would have done the same kind of thing."

She looked at him mistrustfully. "The same kind of thing? It's never the same with them! Whatever they do reaches ahead. I've seen such advantage taken of the wounded when they were too weak to resist . . . didn't know what they were saying or doing. . ." Her eyes filled with tears. "A priest and a woman—I feel as if I'd lost my boy!"

The words went through Campton like a sword, and he sprang to his feet. "Oh, for God's sake be quiet—don't say it! What does anything matter but that he's alive?"

"Of course, of course. . . I didn't mean . . . But that he should think only of her, and not of us . . . that he should have deceived us . . . about everything . . . everything. . ."

"Ah, don't say that either! Don't tempt Providence! If he deceived us, as you call it, we've no one but our-