he sleeves rolled back from his strong brown arms, and
his bare head covered with thick wavy hair. If he wore the kind of
clothes that Wallace Sutherland wore, Christina could not help thinking
he would be quite as handsome.

"I like weeds," he was saying, "though they do give a great deal of
trouble. This bind weed now. It is such a plague but I feel sorry
every time I destroy it."

He pulled a long graceful branch with its exquisite pink blossoms and
Christina put out her hand for it. And Gavin was emboldened to gather
a little blossom of the blue jay and hand it to her shyly. He wanted
to tell her that the fire-weed was like her cheeks and the blue jay
like her eyes, but he could not. He knew Christina's ambition, and he
was too proud to play the lover when he was not wanted.

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