"A lovely face!" observed Uncle Ga-Ga, respectfully, as he assisted Liss in administering to Marjorie what they both firmly believed to be First Aid—"but pale, and thin!" He sighed gently. "It is rather beautiful to think that people can still swoon for joy." "Not joy," said Liss, panting—"starvation! But she’ll have her guest at dinner, after all. (She’s coming to now.) It’s been a great pretend! (Darling, lean your head on me.) She’ll be as right as rain to-morrow. In fact, she’s jolly well got to be. It’s her wedding day!" *CHAPTER XVII* *THE UNDEFEATED* This morning I went to church, in a real church—the parish church of Craigfoot. After more than three years, I found myself once again in the Baronrigg gallery. Of late, I have become accustomed to performing my religious exercises in the open air, in a boggy field of Flanders or Picardy, struggling, in company with a choir of some hundreds of devout, mud-splashed "Jocks," armed to the teeth and insufficiently supplied with hymn-books, to produce a respectable volume of psalmody; or listening resignedly, in an east wind, to a sermon replete with apposite references to the canker-wurrum and the pammer-wurrum, delivered with gusto by an untimely young chaplain newly out from home. I shared the Baronrigg pew with the Matron of the Eskerley Auxiliary Military Hospital, and some half-dozen restive convalescents in hospital blue. It was January, and bitter cold, but no fire burned in old Neil Carrick’s grate at the back of the gallery. The coal ration—like the thermometer—hovered near to zero in those days. Of the rightful occupants of the pew there was no representative. The son of the house was commanding his company somewhere in the neighbourhood of La Bassée: at least, that was where I had left him last week. The master—well, there I was no wiser than the rest. All I knew was what I had read in the letter which he had written me at the time of his disappearance—a letter very similar in substance and temper to that received by his son. My eyes wandered over the familiar scene below. Here, too, were changes: even the immutable ritual of a Scottish parish church had been affected by forty-one months of war. Doctor Chirnside was still in command. He was preaching the sermon now—on a text from his beloved Isaiah—more gaunt, more eagle-eyed, more uncompromising than ever. The parish, I knew, were of the opinion that "the auld man was failing." Still, there he was, sticking to his post.