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 counts not to my soul.