It was a lovely springlike morning such as sometimes comes in mid-winter, and he stood on the doorstep and looked over the country-side. All the family, including Marget and Watty Laidlaw and his wife, stood around him. They were loth to let him go. "When will you be back, my boy?" his father asked him. "April, if I can work it," Alan replied. "After two hot weathers in India I simply pine to see the larches out at Etterick, and hear the blackbirds shouting. Scotland owes it to me. Don't you think so, Father?" The motor was at the door, the luggage was in, and the partings said--those wordless partings. Alan jumped into the car and grinned cheerily at them. "Till April," he said. "Remember--Toujours Smiley-face, as we Parisians say----" and he was gone. They turned to go in, and Marget said fiercely: "Eh, I wull tak' it ill oot if thae Germans kill that bonnie laddie." "I almost wish," said Buff, sitting before his porridge with _The Frontiersman's Pocket-Book_ clutched close to comfort his sad heart--"I almost wish that he hadn't come home. I had forgotten how nice he was!" It was in April that he fell, and at Etterick the blackbirds were "shouting" as the telegraph boy--innocent messenger of woe--wheeled his way among the larches. _CHAPTER XX_ "The Poet says dear City of Cecrops, wilt thou not say dear City of God?" Marcus Aurelius. Our story ends where it began, in the Thomsons' parlour in Jeanieville, Pollokshields. It was November then, now it is May, and light long after tea, and in happier circumstances Mr. Thomson would have been out in his shirt-sleeves in the garden, putting in plants and sowing seeds, with Mrs. Thomson (a white shawl round her shoulders) standing beside him admiring, and Alick running the mower, and Jessie offering advice, and Robert sitting with his books by an open window exchanging a remark with them now and again. They had enjoyed many such spring evenings. But this remorseless war had drawn the little Thomsons into the net, and they sat huddled in the parlour, with no thought for the gay green world outside. This was Robert's last evening at home. He had been training ever since the war broke out, and was now about to sail for the East. They feared that Gallipoli was his destination, that ill-omened place on whose alien shores thousands and thousands of our best and bravest were to "drink death like wine," while their country looked on in anguished pride. Mr. Chalmers, their new minister, had been in to tea. He had clapped Robert on the back and told him he was proud of him, and proud of the great Cause he was going to fight for. "I envy you, my boy," he said. Robert had said nothing, but his face wore the expression "_Huch! Away!_" and when the well-meaning parson had gone he expressed a desire to know what the man thought he was talking about. "But, man Rubbert," his father said anxiously, "surely you're glad to fight for the Right?"