A SON AT THE FRONT
At the hospital he followed her in. The Davril family, she told him, had insisted that they had no claim on his picture, and that it must be returned to him. Mrs. Talkett went up to fetch it; and Campton waited in one of the drawing-rooms. A step sounded behind him, and another nurse came in—but was it a nurse, or some haloed nun from a Umbrian triptych, her pure oval framed in white, her long fingers clasping a book and lily?
"Mme. de Dolmetsch!" he cried; and thought: "A new face again—what an artist!"
She seized his hands.
"I heard from dear Madge Talkett that you were here, and I've asked her to leave us together." She looked at him with ravaged eyes, as if just risen from a penitential vigil.
"Come, please, into my little office: you didn't know that I was the Infirmière-Major? My dear friend, what upheavals, what cataclysms! I see no one now: all my days and nights are given to my soldiers."
She glided ahead on noiseless sandals to a little room where a bowl of jade filled with gardenias, and a tortoise-shell box of gold-tipped cigarettes, stood on a desk among torn and discoloured livrets militaires. The room was empty, and Mme. de Dolmetsch, closing the door, drew Campton to a seat at her side. So close to her, he saw that the perfect lines of her face were flawed by marks of suffering. "The woman really has
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