"April, if I can work it," Alan replied. "After two hot weathers in India I simply pine to see the larches out at Etterick, and hear the blackbirds shouting. Scotland owes it to me. Don't you think so, Father?"
The motor was at the door, the luggage was in, and the partings said—those wordless partings. Alan jumped into the car and grinned cheerily at them.
"Till April," he said. "Remember—Toujours Smiley-face, as we Parisians say——" and he was gone.
They turned to go in, and Marget said fiercely:
"Eh, I wull tak' it ill oot if thae Germans kill that bonnie laddie."
"I almost wish," said Buff, sitting before his porridge with The Frontiersman's Pocket-Book clutched close to comfort his sad heart—"I almost wish that he hadn't come home. I had forgotten how nice he was!"
It was in April that he fell, and at Etterick the blackbirds were "shouting" as the telegraph boy—innocent messenger of woe—wheeled his way among the larches.
CHAPTER XX
"The Poet says dear City of Cecrops, wilt thou not say dear City of God?"
Marcus Aurelius.
Our story ends where it began, in the Thomsons' parlour in Jeanieville, Pollokshields.