that was coming over his face.

"I want to see--Phil--" he whispered.

"Yes--yes, I will find him," she said soothingly; "I will go
immediately and find him."

His head was moving slowly, monotonously, from side to side.

"I want to see my boy," he murmured. "He is my son. I wish you to
know it--my only son."

He lifted his brilliant eyes to Ailsa.

Twice he strove to speak, and could not, and she watched him,
stunned.

He made the supreme effort.

"Philip!" he gasped; "our son! My little son! My little, little
boy! I want him, Ailsa, I want him near me when I die!"

CHAPTER XX

They told her that Berkley had gone up the hill toward the firing
line.

On the windy hill-top, hub deep in dry, dead grass, a section of a
battery was in action, the violent light from the discharges
lashing out through the rushing vapours which the wind flattened
and drove, back into the hollow below so that the cannoneers seemed
to be wading waist deep in fog.

The sick and wounded on their cots and stretchers were coughing and
gasping in the hot mist; the partly erected tents had become full
of it. And now the air in the hollow grew more suffocating as
fragments of burning powder and wadding set the dead grass afire,
and the thick, strangling blue smoke spread over everything.

Surgeons and assistants were working like beavers to house their
patients; every now and then a bullet darted into the vale with an
evil buzz, rewounding, sometimes killing, the crippled. To add to
the complication and confusion, more wounded arrived from the
firing line above and beyond to the westward; horses began to fall
where they stood harnessed to the caissons; a fine, powerful
gun-team galloping back to refill its chests suddenly reared
straight up into annihilation, enveloped in the volcanic horror of
a shell, so near that Ailsa, standing below in a clump of willows,
saw the flash and smoke of the cataclysm and the flying
disintegration of dark objects scattering through the smoke.

Far away on the hillside an artilleryman, making a funnel of his
hands, shouted for stretchers; and Ailsa, repeating the call,
managed to gather together half a dozen overworked bearers and
start with them up through the smoke.

Deafened, blinded, her senses almost reeling under the
nerve-shattering crash of the guns, she toiled on through the dry
grass, pausing at the edge of charred spaces to beat out the low
flames that leaped toward her skirt