"I beg your pardon, sirr—" he began again. Again the words were taken out of his mouth. Round the corner of the traverse to our left struggled a pitifully familiar group—two stooping men supporting a third between them. The wounded man held an arm resolutely round the neck of each supporter, but his feet dragged in the mud. It was the grey-headed corporal. "Stretcher-bearers, there!" cried one of the men gruffly. "How did they cop you, Corporal?" inquired a Royal Loyal, leaning down sympathetically from the firing-step. "That last trench-mortar!" gasped the grey-haired man, as they set him down on the floor of the trench, just below the Lewis gun emplacement. He turned his head feebly in our direction, and our eyes met for the first time. At the same moment Roy gave a cry and started forward. Then I understood what Herriott had been trying to tell me. Tom Birnie lay dying before our eyes—at the feet of his own son. Roy, very white, dropped on his knees beside his father. A stretcher came, and we did what we could. Tom had a dreadful wound in his side; plainly it was only a matter of minutes. I remember seeing Roy unbuckle his own equipment, take off his tunic, and wrap it round his father’s shoulders. Tom’s eyes were closed; his breathing was laboured; he recognised no one. For a moment the tempest of battle around us seemed to stand still. The crowded trench was silent; the men on the firing-step looked down curiously. Roy still knelt beside his father, motionless. Herriott, who had worked on the Baronrigg estate ever since he could walk, stood rigidly at attention at the foot of the Laird’s stretcher, with tears trickling down his cheeks. At last Tom’s eyes opened. He smiled and said faintly: "That you, Roy? Good boy! I was expecting you.... I carried on as well as I could, until you came to take over.... I knew you would come.... I knew! Give your father a kiss, old man." Roy bowed his head.... Next moment, with the shriek of an express train emerging from a tunnel, a German shell whirled out of the blue and exploded against the traverse a few yards away. When I came to myself I was being carried in Herriott’s arms—and I weigh nearly fourteen stone—back through the mazes of Fountain Keep in the direction of the first aid post. After more than three years of continuous seeking I had achieved the soldier’s ambition—a "blighty." That night, as I passed on my jolting way to the base, with a smashed collar-bone and a damaged skull, my rambling dreams ran naturally on one subject—that strange meeting between father and son; and the spectacle of the one passing on to the other, as it were some precious inheritance, the safe custody of Fountain Keep. *CHAPTER XXI* *IDENTITIES* *I*