Then the miracle happened. First at Gib, then at Malta, Aden, Colombo, Penang, and now here. All along the vast ocean journey, four weeks long, wherever the great ship touched, there ashore flew the old flag, his flag. There stood his own countrymen on guard beneath its folds. Home? Why, he had brought it with him. There it was ashore now, and there stood his blood brother, white-helmeted, his bayonet flashing in the sun for witness of his birthright. Rupert could hear a band playing somewhere ashore, and as though in answer to his thoughts across the water there floated the heart-swelling strain of "Home, Sweet Home." He listened entranced till the air died away and all was silent. Then came the stirring crash of the National Anthem. He remembered the last time he had heard it. At the Moreton flower-show. It brought back in a flash to him the faint damp scent of moss and roses. That happy summer day. Home and all it stood for was here! It was good to be a Briton and feel this glorious freedom, this great sense of fellowship, of ownership. "You will be getting sunstroke if you stand there with your helmet off, Cotton." He started—the spell was broken. His fellow-passenger, a grey-haired, clean-shaven man of fifty, with whom he had struck up a friendship during the voyage, stood behind him with a smile on his kindly face, which was lighted by a pair of keen, grey eyes. "It sounds good to us exiles—the old tune—doesn’t it? ’What does he know of England who only England knows?’ Eh? The chap who wrote that must have known something of our Empire—what? And yet there are millions of fools in the old country this moment who neither know nor care whether the Empire exists or not; while the very bread they eat is bought with the blood of those who created it! Look at that long wharf over there. See those piles of bales? That is cotton pieces from Manchester. See those chests piled under that big shed? Tea—cheap ’Straits’ tea—shilling a pound in any little grocer’s shop at home! See that steamer loading those sacks, there, that black-funnelled one? That’s sago, that the kiddies eat at home." "Wonderful!" Rupert echoed, and then he sighed. He had left the old country—a felon. He had found a new world, a free man!—with his country’s flag flying a welcome. And yet—— "Do you see that little cruiser over there?" Patterson continued excitedly. "It’s hard to realise that she’s the only British warship within a thousand miles of this—the most important trade-route in the world. No, that’s not a British ship—that big battleship over there is a German, and that other with four big black funnels is a Jap, and the one beyond is a Russian. Bit of a shock, isn’t it, when you recognise what a tiny thing the British Navy is compared to the Colonial Empire it has to defend?" Rupert nodded. His head was in a whirl—and his heart. He had reached the end of his journey. He was free! And yet——