her commands to the officers, by whom they were conveyed
to the regiment, which received them with a shout, and instantly began
to strike its camp.

Then it was, coming hot-foot after so much sorrow, loss and doubt, that
there followed the happiest event of all my life. Utterly tired out and
very despondent, I was seated on an arrow-chest awaiting the order to
march, idly watching Oliver and Maqueda talking with great earnestness
at a little distance, and in the intervals trying to prevent poor Higgs
at my side from falling asleep. While I was thus engaged, suddenly I
heard a disturbance, and by the bright moonlight caught sight of a man
being led into the camp in charge of a guard of Abati soldiers, whom
from their dress I knew to belong to a company that just then was
employed in watching the lower gates of the pass.

I took no particular heed of the incident, thinking only that they might
have captured some spy, till a murmur of astonishment, and the general
stir, warned me that something unusual had occurred. So I rose from my
box and strolled towards the man, who now was hidden from me by a group
of Mountaineers. As I advanced this group opened, the men who composed
it bowing to me with a kind of wondering respect that impressed me, I
did not know why.

Then for the first time I saw the prisoner. He was a tall, athletic
young man, dressed in festal robes with a heavy gold chain about his
neck, and I wondered vaguely what such a person should be doing here
in this time of national commotion. He turned his head so that the
moonlight showed his dark eyes, his somewhat oval-shaped face ending in
a peaked black beard, and his finely cut features. In an instant I knew
him.

_It was my son Roderick!_

Next moment, for the first time for very many years, he was in my arms.

The first thing that I remember saying to him was a typically
Anglo-Saxon remark, for however much we live in the East or elsewhere,
we never really shake off our native conventions, and habits of speech.
It was, "How are you, my boy, and how on earth did you come here?"
to which he answered, slowly, it is true, and speaking with a foreign
accent:

"All right, thank you, father. I ran upon my legs."

By this time Higgs hobbled up, and was greeting my son warmly, for, of
course, they were old friends.

"Thought you were to be married to-night, Roderick?" he said.

"Yes, yes," he answered, "I am half married according to Fung custom,
which c