But he walked by her side, across the Slash, and Christina felt that old sense of happy companionship in his presence. The berries were fairly falling off the branches in ripe luxuriance, and they filled the little pail she had brought in quite too short a time. Behind them the top of Craig-Ellachie stretched up to catch the last light of the setting sun. Her home fields spread out beneath; the dusk laying its velvet cloak softly over them. The air was so still, the sound of the horses being driven to the water trough came up from the barnyard. And then there came across the rose-touched hills a new sound, the dull throb of a drum. "What is that?" asked Christina. They stood side by side and listened, looking in the direction of the town, where now the electric lights glowed against the sky. The sound came from the great outside world like the pulse beat of another life, the life into which Christina was longing to plunge. "Maybe it's about the war," said Gavin; he suddenly raised his head and his eyes grew bright. "Perhaps it means that England is in it." "Oh," Christina looked at him surprised. "It would be awful if the Old Country got into it," she exclaimed. "Surely they won't." "It would be worse if she did not," said Gavin. "Think of Belgium." "But what if they sent a Canadian contingent. I wouldn't like anybody I know to go to war." Gavin made no reply. Christina wished he would say he would like to go. They stood for a little listening to the drum. And the girl had no slightest idea that to the young man the sound was as a bugle call. It was Gavin's reveille, and it summoned him across the hills to come away. But he knew he could not obey, and he stood silent saying no word of the tumult it raised in his heart. The next day the news that the drum had sent over the hills came to Orchard Glen. England was in the war and she would in all probability call for a Canadian contingent. Indeed Algonquin had not waited to know, but was going to offer one herself whether the rest of Canada was loyal or not. And on the very day that Britain entered the Great War, this little obscure town, set far away north in a ring of forest and lake, was calling her sons to go over seas and help the Mother Land. And it was the sound of her drums that had penetrated to the hills of Orchard Glen and had set Gavin Grant's heart throbbing in time to its beat. Mrs. Johnnie Dunn had gone into town that morning with her milk as usual, and on her return she went out to the hay field to see if her two underlings had been attending to business in her absence. Marthy and Trooper Tom were good friends and they were not working so hard that they were unable to have a little friendly chat. The Woman bore down upon them. "Well, if ever there was a time when there should be no hangin' round an' palaverin' that time is jist right now," she declared. "What d'ye think's the latest?"