Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/415

Now and then Campton, sitting beside him, seemed to see a little way into those darknesses; but after a moment he always shuddered back to daylight, benumbed, inadequate, weighed down with the weakness of the flesh and the incapacity to reach beyond his habitual limit of sensation. "No wonder they don't talk to us," he mused.

By-and-bye, perhaps, when George was well again, and the war over, the father might penetrate into his son's mind, and find some new ground of communion with him: now the thing was not to be conceived.

He recalled again Adele Anthony's asking him, when he had come back from Doullens: "What was the first thing you felt?" and his answering: "Nothing.". . . Well, it was like that now: every vibration had ceased in him. Between himself and George lay the unbridgeable abyss of his son's experiences.

As he sat there, the door was softly opened a few inches and Boylston's face showed through the crack: light shot from it like the rays around a chalice. At a sign from him Campton slipped out into the corridor and Boylston silently pushed a newspaper into his grasp. He bent over it, trying with dazzled eyes to read sense into the staring head-lines: but "America—America—America———" was all that he could see.

A nurse came gliding up on light feet: the tears were running down her face. "Yes—I know, I know, I