eatest struggle of history; a death-struggle of
sore-pressed Freedom against hideous Oppression was shaking the earth,
and the smoke of the conflict was blackening the heavens--and through
it all Gavin Grant remained at peace in his home! Every old Belgian
woman of whom he read, driven from her ruined home, was Auntie Elspie.
Every Belgian girl, suffering unspeakable wrong, was Christina. And
they were crying night and day to him for help and crying in vain.

Many a night, after he had read a flaming page of Belgium's and
Armenia's fearful history, he sat, sleepless, by the dying kitchen fire
until dawn, and the day that the name of Edith Cavell was written in
letters of fire across the sides of civilisation, Gavin went off into
the woods alone with his axe, and tried to put some of the fury that
was burning him up into savage blows against the unoffending timber.

And then the Orchard Glen boys began to answer the call, one by one;
Burke and Trooper, and Christina's brothers. Tommy Holmes and Charlie
Henderson, and Bruce McKenzie, and he was like Gareth in the story
Auntie Flora had so often told him, Gareth who had to work in the
kitchen, while his brother-knights rode clanking past him through the
doorway, out into the world of mighty deeds, out to meet Death on the
Field of Glory. Those were the days when he had to repeat "Stand fast,
Craig-Ellachie" over and over again as he went about his peaceful
tasks. It brought him little comfort, for it was not to stand fast
that he wanted, but to spring forward in answer to the call to the
hazardous task, to death itself, the call which through the ages has
always summoned the high heart. Sometimes the acutest misery would
seize him at the thought that persistently haunted him, the fear that
if he had been really a Grant he would have seen his duty more clearly
and would already be in the battle line. Perhaps there was some
necessary spirit left out of him, some saving quality which his
degraded parents could not hand down to him. If he had been of better
blood might he not have paid no attention to tears and partings but
have thrown away everything in the glorious chance of dying in the
greatest cause for which the world had ever struggled?

He argued the question from every point, and yet he could not find it
in his soul to leave his Aunts. He watched them intently to see if
they would drop any hint of their opinion in the matter. But while
they highly admired