The tears were running down her face as she spoke, and Ann said, "Poor Mother, it was hardest for you. Your cry was the old, old cry: 'Joseph is not, Simeon is not, and ye will take Benjamin away....' But our Benjamin was so glad to go. And he never found anything to grumble at, not even at Bramshott, where there was nothing fit to eat, and the huts leaked, and the mud was unspeakable, and his uniform consisted of a red tunic made for a very large man, and a pair of exceedingly bad blue breeks. When he came at Christmas--he made me think of one of Prince Charlie's men with his shabby uniform and yellow hair--how glad he was to have a real wallowing hot bath, with bath salts and warm towels, and get into his own tweeds. He was just beginning to get clean when he had to go again! In a few weeks he got his commission, and in the autumn of 1915 he went to France--'as gentle and as jocund as to jest went he to fight.'" There was a silence in the pleasant room as the two women thought their own thoughts, and the fire crackled and the winter wind beat upon the house. Mrs. Douglas spoke first. "It was a wonderful oasis in that desert of anxiety when Davie was wounded and at home. Those nights when we had lain awake thinking of him in the trenches, those days when we were afraid for every ring at the bell, and hardly dared look when we opened the hall door after being out, in case the orange envelope should be lying on the table. To have all that suddenly changed. To know that he was lying safe and warm and clean in a white bed in a private hospital in London, 'lying there with a face like a herd,' Mark wrote, with nothing much the matter with him but a shrapnel wound in his leg--it was almost too much relief. And we had him at Queensferry all summer. We were greatly blessed, Ann." "And it wasn't quite so bad letting him go the second time," Ann said. "He had been there once and had got out alive and he knew the men he was going to, and was glad to go back; and Mark wasn't far from him, and could see him sometimes." "His letters were so cheery. From his accounts you would have thought that living in the trenches was a sort of jolly picnic. Oh, Ann, do you remember the letter to me written in the train going up to the line, when he said he had dreamt he was a small boy again, and 'I thought I had lost you, wee body, and I woke up shouting "Mother," to the amusement of the other men in the carriage?'"