Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/385

And just then, across the width of the gardens he saw, beyond a stretch of turf and clipped shrubs, two people, also motionless, who seemed to have the same cup at their lips. He recognized his son and Mrs. Talkett.

Their backs were toward him, and they stood close together, looking with the same eyes at the same sight: an Apollo touched with flying sunlight. After a while they walked on again, slowly and close to each other. George, as they moved, seemed now and then to point out some beauty of sculpture, or the colour of a lichened urn; and once they turned and took their fill of the great perspective tapering to the Arch—the Arch on which Rude's Mænad-Marseillaise still yelled her battalions on to death.

Campton finished his charcoal of Mme. Lebel; then he attacked her in oils. Now that his work at the Palais Royal was ended, painting was once more his only refuge.

Adele Anthony had returned to her refugees; Boylston, pale and obstinate, toiled on at Preparedness. But Campton found it impossible to take up any new form of work; his philanthropic ardour was exhausted. He could only shut himself up, for long solitary hours, in the empty and echoing temple of his art.

George emphatically approved of his course: George