A SON AT THE FRONT
me to do something more about George—take any new steps—it's no use. I can't do the sort of thing to keep my son safe that Mme. de Dolmetsch would do for her lover."
Mrs. Brant stared. "Safe? He was killed the day after he got to the front."
"Good Lord—Isador?"
Ladislas Isador killed at the front! The words remained unmeaning; by no effort could Campton relate them to the fat middle-aged philanderer with his Jewish eyes, his Slav eloquence, his Levantine gift for getting on, and for getting out from under. Campton tried to picture the clever contriving devil drawn in his turn into that merciless red eddy, and gulped down the Monster's throat with the rest. What a mad world it was, in which the same horrible and magnificent doom awaited the coward and the hero!
"Poor Mme. de Dolmetsch!" he muttered, remembering with a sense of remorse her desperate appeal and his curt rebuff. Once again the poor creature's love had enlightened her, and she had foreseen what no one else in the world would have believed: that her lover was to die like a hero.
"Isador was nearly forty, and had a weak heart; and she'd left nothing, literally nothing, undone to save him." Campton read in his wife's eyes what was coming. "It's impossible now that George should not be taken," Mrs. Brant went on.
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