These things Campton, unconsciously, had put out of his mind, or rather had lost out of his mind, from the moment when he had heard of George’s wounding. By-and-bye, he knew, the sense of them, and of the questions they raised, would come back and possess him; but meanwhile, emptied of all else, he brimmed with the mere fact of George’s bodily presence, with the physical signs of him, his weakness, his temperature, the pain in his arm, the oppression on his lung, all the daily insistent details involved in coaxing him slowly back to life.
The father could bear no more; he put the letter away, as a man might put away something of which his heart was too full to measure it. Later—yes; now, all he knew was that his son was alive.
But the hour of Campton’s entering into glory came when, two or three days later, George asked with a sudden smile: “When I exchanged regiments I did what you’d always hoped I would, eh, Dad?”
It was the first allusion, on the part of either, to the mystery of George’s transit from the Argonne to the front. At Doullens he had been too weak to be questioned, and as he grew stronger, and entered upon the successive stages of his convalescence, he gave the impression of having travelled far beyond such matters, and of living his real life in some inconceivable region from which, with that new smile of his, he continued to look down unseeingly on his parents. “It’s exactly as if he were dead,” the father thought. “And if he were, he might go on watching us with just such a smile.”
And then, one morning as they were taking a few steps on a sunny terrace, Campton had felt the pressure of the boy’s sound arm, and caught the old George in his look.
“I ... good Lord ... at any rate I’m glad you felt sure of me,” Campton could only stammer in reply.
George laughed. “Well—rather!”
There was a long silence full of sea-murmurs, too drowsy and indolent, for once, to simulate the horror of the guns.
“I—I only wish you’d felt you could trust me about it from the first, as you did Adele and Boylston,” the father continued.