The climax had come that very morning, with the arrival, for Joe, of a circular from his old school, requesting that he would "be so kind as to fill up the enclosed form" with certain specific information regarding his military service, for inclusion in the School Roll of Honour—his rank, his unit, mentions in dispatches, and the like. There was no alternative column to fill in; no comfortable loophole labelled "Civilian war work of national importance"—nothing of that kind at all: nothing but a stark request for poor Joe’s military status and record. It had not occurred to the editors that any Old Boy could, in these days, be elsewhere than in khaki. Consequently, Marjorie had found Joe after breakfast, with his head in his arms, crying like a child in a corner of the unfrequented and cheerless Netherby smoking-room. (Albert Clegg did not smoke.) After comforting him in the only fashion she knew—and a very acceptable fashion any young man but a brother would have considered it—she made up her mind on the spot to accept a certain sentimental invitation somewhat shyly offered by Roy Birnie, and laughingly refused by herself, two days previously. That was why she was now lying in the bracken on the edge of Craigfoot Wood, gazing up the road to Baronrigg. *II* It was Roy’s last day at home. At the outbreak of war, to his own intense indignation, he had been refused a commission. Many of his young friends, common civilians no older than himself, had been endowed with what they described as ’one pip’ and set to command platoons all over the country. But Roy, as a prospective regular, had been despatched—the victim of a conspiracy in which he traced the hand of every person but the right one—to Sandhurst, where he was compelled to undergo an intensive education in the science of warfare, speculating grimly meanwhile as to the kind of mess his amateur supplanters were making of the British Expeditionary Force. Sometimes he woke at night in a cold sweat, having dreamed, as he had sometimes dreamed before a house match, that the war had come to an end before he had had his innings. Now, at last, he was emancipated. He was a second lieutenant. He could wear a Sam Browne belt and look an A.P.M. right in the face—instead of hurriedly plunging down side streets to avoid that suspicious official’s eye, as he had frequently done when up in London on leave with a crony, the pair of them decked in borrowed trappings to which a cadet’s rank did not entitle them. He was an officer, holding the King’s Commission; and, best of all, had been gazetted to the Second Battalion of the old regiment, of which his uncle, "Leathery Laing," was now second-in-command. He had completed his draft leave, and was to report at the Depot at six o’clock this Sunday evening, to take charge of a contingent bound overseas to reënforce the battalion at a point on the Western Front as yet unrevealed.