“Poor Benny, poor boy!” she repeated, in the happy voice she might have had if she had been congratulating Campton on the lad’s escape. He saw that she was still thinking not of Upsher but of George, and her inability to fit her intonation to her words betrayed the violence of her relief. But why had she imagined George to be in danger?
Campton recounted the scene at which he had just assisted, and while she continued to murmur her sympathy he asked abruptly: “Why on earth should you have been afraid for George?”
Miss Anthony had taken her usual armchair. It was placed, as the armchairs of elderly ladies usually are, with its high back to the light, and Campton could no longer observe the discrepancy between her words and her looks. This probably gave her laugh its note of confidence. “My dear, if you were to cut me open George’s name would run out of every vein,” she said.
“But in that tone—it was your tone. You thought he’d been—that something had happened,” Campton insisted. “How could it, where he is?”
She shrugged her shoulders in the “foreign” way she had picked up in her youth. The gesture was as incongruous as her slang, but it had become part of her physical self, which lay in a loose mosaic of incongruities over the solid crystal block of her character.
“Why, indeed? I suppose there are risks everywhere, aren’t there?”
“I don’t know.” He pulled out the letter he had received that morning. A sudden light had illuminated it, and his hand shook. “I don’t even know where George is any longer.”
She seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then asked calmly: “What do you mean?”
“Here—look at this. We’re to write to his base. I’m to tell his mother of the change.” He waited, cursing the faint winter light, and the protecting back of her chair. “What can it mean,” he broke out, “except that he’s left Sainte Menehould, that he’s been sent elsewhere, and that he doesn’t want us to find out where?”
Miss Anthony bent her long nose over the page. Her hand held the letter steadily, and he guessed, as she perused it, that she had had one of the same kind, and had already drawn her own conclusions. What they were, that first startled “George!” seemed to say. But would she ever let Campton see as far into her thoughts again? He continued to watch her hands patiently, since nothing was to be discovered of her face. The hands folded the letter with precision, and handed it back to him.