Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/416

know!" she exulted. Up the tall stairs and through the ramifying of long white passages rose an unwonted rumour of sound, checked, subdued, invisibly rebuked, but ever again breaking out, like the noise of ripples on a windless beach. In every direction nurses and orderlies were speeding from one room to another of the house of pain with the message: "America has declared war on Germany."

Campton and Boylston stole back into George's room. George lifted his eyelids and smiled at them, understanding before they spoke.

"The sixth of April! Remember the date!" Boylston cried over him in a gleeful whisper.

The wounded man, held fast in his splints, contrived to raise his head a little. His eyes laughed back into Boylston's. "You'll be in uniform within a week!" he said; and Boylston crimsoned.

Campton turned away again to the window. The day had come—had come; and his son had lived to see it. So many of George's comrades had gone down to death without hope; and in a few months more George, leaning from that same window—or perhaps well enough to be watching the spectacle with his father from the terrace of the Tuileries—would look out on the first brown battalions marching across the Place de la Concorde, where father and son, in the early days of the war, had seen the young recruits of the Foreign Legion patrolling under improvised flags.