The French peasants, who had been fired upon and had gained the
protection of the slope, gathered about them.
“Beyond, also, the road is open to fire,” Gerry informed them in
French; and he directed them to proceed in little groups and by the
fields away from the road.
“Monsieur le Lieutenant is wounded,” an old man observed
solicitously.
“Barely at all,” Gerry denied; but swayed as he said so.
“Your car must go by the road,” Gerry said to Ruth. “You go with
them in the fields; I will take it on for a bit.”
He meant to relieve her for the run over the exposed stretch. He
tried to step up to the driver’s seat; but his leg would not bear
his weight and he fell backward and would have gone to the ground
had Ruth not caught him.
“That’s simply a knee twist from being bent under my ship,” he
asserted. “That shrap hardly scratched me,” he referred to the red
spot on his side where her fingers were feeling.
“Help me lift Monsieur le Lieutenant,” Ruth bid the old peasant.
Gerry tried again to climb alone; but his leg had quite given away.
As they lifted, he pulled himself into the seat and took the wheel.
“You need both feet for the pedals,” Ruth reminded him, simply; and
he moved over without further protest and let her drive. The car was
a covered Ford truck and Gerry, gazing back, saw an old French
woman, a child, and two men, who had been injured, lying upon the
bedding over the floor. The car was coming to the section of road
which the German gunner had registered and Gerry turned about and
watched Ruth while she drove.
He had never seen her doing anything like this before; and the sight
of her small, white hands, so steady and firm on the wheel, her
little, slender, booted feet upon the pedals sent a thrill tingling
through him. He was a little dizzy for a moment and he closed his
eyes, clutching to the side of his seat. A shell smashed twenty
yards before them; parts of it hit the car. The shock of it startled
Gerry up; but the girl beside him was not hit nor frightened.
Swiftly she swerved the car to dodge the hole in the road where the
gravel was still slipping and settling; the next shell was behind
and while they fled now, the shells all were behind and farther and
farther back till they ceased.
Ruth halted her car and waited for her charges to gather on the
road; all of them appeared; none of them had been hurt. The damage
done by the German fire totaled a front wheel much bent and the
radiator ruined.
“We’ll have to run hot,” Ruth said. “We can get on, if we go
slowly.”
Gerry attempted to get down to walk; but his twisted left knee would
not bear him at all. His idea had been to return at once, somehow,
to the battle, as soon as this girl who had come to him was in some
sort of safety. He had planned wildly, to attempt to join the
English fighting to the south of Mirevaux. He couldn’t do that now;
but, with strength enough in his leg to move a rudder bar, he could
fly and fight again as soon as he could procure another “ship.” The
only way he could reach the rear and another airplane was to
continue with these refugees and with this girl.
It was strange that when he had been fighting and had been far from
her, he had felt more strongly about her than he did now--more about
her as a girl, that was, in relation to him as a man. He was close
beside her with her body swaying against his when the car careened
in the pits and ruts of the road. He kept observing her--the play of
color in her smooth skin in the flush of her excitement, the steady,
blue eyes alert upon the road, her full, red little lips pressing
tight together after speaking with him and drawing tiny lines of
strain at the corners of her mouth. He noticed pretty things about
her which he had not before--the trimness of her ankles even under
her heavy boots, the ease with which that slender, well-formed
little body exerted its strength, the way her hair at her temples
went into ringlets when effort and anxiety moistened her forehead.
But he noticed these as though to remember them later; his thought
seemed to store them and save them for feeling at another time; he
was almost aware of going through an experience with her which could
affect him, fully, only afterwards. In the same manner that
subconsciously he had thought about her when all his conscious
thought was absorbed in flying and fighting, now his eyes only
observed her; his soul was blent in the battle.
He and she, and the rest, were going back--back, kilometer after
kilometer and yet encountering no strong force of English or French
in position to hold that land; and he knew that if that depth of
front was being abandoned as far away to the right and as far away
to the left as he could see, resistance must have broken down over a
much greater front. Indeed, Gerry had himself observed from his
airplane something of the length of the line where the allies were
retreating; but he had not been able, when in the air, and passing
in a few seconds over a kilometer, to feel the disaster as now he
felt it in the swaying seat of the half-wrecked truck creeping along
at the head of a column of refugees. This land which the Germans
were again overrunning in a day was the strip which the English had
freed the year before only through the long, murderous months of the
“blood baths” of the Somme.
“Do you remember an English officer on the _Ribot_,” Ruth was asking
of him, “whom I called ‘1582?’”
“He’s about here?” Gerry inquired.
“No; but several of his sort are--one particularly, a Lieutenant
Haddon-Staples; I called him, to myself, ‘1583.’”
“What do you think of his sort now?” Gerry asked, confidently.
Ruth’s eyes filled suddenly so that she had to raise a hand from the
driving-wheel to dash away the wetness which blurred the road.
“They’re the most wonderful sportsmen in the world!” Ruth said.
“They don’t care about odds against them; or at least they don’t
complain. Oh, that’s not the word; complaint is about as far from
their attitude as anything you can think of.”
“I know,” Gerry said.
“They don’t even--criticize. They just accept the odds, whatever
they are; and go in with all of themselves as though they had a
chance to hold and win and come out alive! They know they haven’t;
but you’d never guess it from them; and there’s none of that ‘We who
are about to die salute you’ idea in them either. They’re sportsmen
and gentlemen!”
“I know how they make you feel,” Gerry said, watching her keenly
again; the road thereabouts was bad and she couldn’t even glance
around to him. “Rather, you know now how they made me feel, I
think.”
She made no reply; so he went on. “If they’d say things out to us;
if they had criticized us and damned us and told us we were lying
down behind them, it wouldn’t be so rotten hard to see them. But
they don’t. They just go in as you say; they feel they’ve a fight on
which is their fight and they’re going to fight it whether anyone
else thinks it worth while to fight it or not or whether they have
any chance for winning.”
Ruth winked swiftly again to clear her eyes; and Gerry, watching
her, wondered what particular experience his general praise had
called up. He did not ask; but she told him.
“‘1583’ was just that sort of man, Gerry,” she said, using his name
for the first time as simply as he had spoken hers when she had
crouched behind the shield of his engine with him.
“He’s killed?” Gerry asked.
“I don’t know; but it’s certain--yes, he’s killed,” she replied.
“You--cared for him, Cynthia?”
“He was about here--I mean about Mirevaux--as long as I’ve been.
That was only two weeks--‘a fortnight,’ as he’d say in his funny,
English way--but now it seems----”
“I know,” Gerry said.
“He was with his battalion which was lying in reserve. He and some
of the others didn’t have a lot to do evenings so they’d drop in
pretty often at the cottage Mrs. Mayhew and I had where there was
one of those little, portable organs with three octaves and we’d
play their songs sometimes and ours--like _Good King Wenceslaus_ and
_Clementine_.”
“Did you play?” Gerry interrupted.
“Sometimes; and sometimes he would; and we’d all sing,
In the cabin, in the cañon,
Excavating for a mine;
Dwelt a miner, forty-niner--
All the English liked that sort best with _Wait for the Wagon_, you
know.”
“Yes.”
It was a minute or two before she continued; she was speaking of
evenings none of them older than two weeks and one of them only the
night before last; but they formed part of an experience irrevocable
now and of an epoch past.
“They knew pretty well what was going to happen to them--that they
would have to be thrown in some day without a chance. But they
talked about coming to America after the war--the mining camps of
Nevada and California, the Grand Cañon, Niagara Falls, and Mammoth
Cave appealed to them, particularly. I asked ‘1583’ once--I knew him
best,” Ruth said; and when she repeated the nickname for him it was
with the wistful fondness with which only such a name may be said,
“if he didn’t want to go back home to England and Suffolkshire after
the war. He said, ‘I’m eager to stay a bit with the pater and the
mater, naturally.’” She was imitating his voice; and Gerry saw that
it made her cry; but she went on. “‘But I can’t stay there, you
know.’
“I asked, why.
“‘My friends,’ he said. ‘I’ve not one now. You fancy you’re attached
to a place; but you find, you know, you’ve cared for more than
that.’ Then he changed the subject the way the English always do
when you come to something they feel. He was with me the evening
this battle began; and he knew what was coming. I didn’t see him
again till this morning--early this morning,” she repeated as though
unable to believe the shortness of the time. “He rode over to warn
us; and then, a little later when I was getting my first party of
people out of Mirevaux, I passed him with some more men just like
him going to the firing. He knew he was going to be killed for he’d
told us the Germans had broken through; and we couldn’t hold them.
But he wasn’t thinking about that when he saw me. He just watched me
as I was working to get my people in order and, as he rode past, he
called out, ‘Good old America!’ That to me--one girl getting
peasants out of a village while he and his handful of soldiers were
going--there!” Ruth gestured back toward the battle. “Oh, I wanted
to be a million men for him--for them! ‘Good old America!’ he said.
I saw him, or men whom I think he was with, holding a hill a couple
of miles east an hour later; they were one to ten or one to twenty;
I don’t know what the odds were against them; but they stayed on top
of that hill. I tell you I saw them--stay on top of that hill.”
“I know,” Gerry said. “I’ve seen them stay on top of a hill. I know
how it is to want to be, for them, a million men!”
Ruth’s hands on the steering-wheel went bloodless from pressure.
“Our million is coming; thank God, it’s coming! And I believe--I
must believe that somehow it still is right and best that we
couldn’t come before.” She gazed back over the land where the
Germans were advancing; and where the English soldiers were
“staying.”
“How could this happen, this break-through?” she asked. “It wasn’t
just superior numbers; they’ve had that and, at other times, we’ve
had superiority before; but no one ever advanced like this.”
“They showed an entirely new attack,” Gerry said. “New infantry
formation; new arms--infantry cannon; then there was the mist. And
our intelligence people must have fallen down, too, while theirs
gave them everything they wanted. We didn’t know at all what they
were going to do, but they must have known everything about our
strength, or lack of strength, here.”
He saw her hands whiten again with their grasp of the wheel and the
little lines deepen under her tight-drawn lips. She had stiffened as
though he had accused her; and while he was wondering why, she
glanced up at him.
“Then part of this--” her gaze had gone again to the fields being
abandoned--“is my fault, Gerry.”
That was all she said; but instantly he thought of her accusation of
De Trevenac and what she had told him in the little parlor on the
Rue des Saints Pères; and he was so certain that she was thinking of
it also that he asked:
“You mean you didn’t tell me all you knew about De Trevenac?”
“No; I told you everything I knew! Oh, I wouldn’t have held back any
of that. I mean, I haven’t done all I might; you see, I never
imagined anything like this could happen.”
“What might you have done, Cynthia?” he asked. He had said to her
that time in the parlor on the Rue des Saints Pères that she had
come to do more than mere relief work; but he had not consistently
thought of her as engaged in that more daring work against which he
had warned her.
“I got so wrapt up in the work at Mirevaux,” she said, avoiding
direct answer. “I thought it was all right to let myself just do
that for a while.”
“Whereas?” he challenged.
She leaned forward and turned the ignition switch, stopping the
motor which had been laboring and grinding grievously. “It must cool
off,” she said, leaping down upon the ground. She went about to the
back of the truck and Gerry heard her speaking in French to the
passengers behind him.
“Grand’mère Bergues,” she said when she returned beside Gerry, “lost
for a moment her twig of the tree. I had to find it for her.”
“Her twig of what tree?” Gerry asked.
“I forgot you didn’t know,” and Ruth told him of Grand’mère Bergues’
tree. “When I convinced her at last,” Ruth added, “that the Boche
had broken through and were coming again, she had a stroke; but even
so she would not let us carry her until I had brought her a twig of
the tree--a twig which was green, and budding, and had sap, though
last year the Boche called that tree destroyed. That now must be her
triumph.”
Ruth restarted the motor and, when they proceeded, Gerry sat without
inquiring again of what dangerous, indefinite business this girl was
going to do. While he watched her driving, a queer, pulling
sensation pulsed in his breast; it associated itself with a vision
of a young Englishman, who now undoubtedly was dead, standing behind
this girl while she played a little organ with three octaves and
they all sang. This was not jealousy, exactly; it was simply
recognition of a sort of fellowship which she could share which he
would have liked to have discovered himself. It suggested not
something more than he had had with Agnes Ertyle; but something
quite different and which he liked. He tried to imagine Agnes
playing, and singing _Clementine_, and _Wait for the Wagon_; and--he
couldn’t. He tried to imagine her crying because someone had called
to her, “Good old England”; and he couldn’t. Agnes cried over some
things--children who were brought to her and badly wounded boys who
died. But Agnes could have told him all that Cynthia had without any
emotion at all. Agnes would have told it quite differently, of
course.
They were coming in sight of a flying field. “Let me off here,
please,” Gerry asked when they were opposite it.
When Ruth stopped the car Gerry called for one of the old Frenchmen
to give him a shoulder and he stepped down. “You don’t need much leg
muscle to fly,” he assured Ruth when she observed him anxiously. “If
I can’t steal a ship over there, at least they’ll take care of me.”
He hesitated, looking up at her, unable simply to thank her for what
she had done.
“Where are you going?” he asked. During their drive they had
discussed various destinations for their party; but could decide
upon none. The final halting place must depend upon the military
situation, and nothing was more unsettled than that. But Gerry was
not referring now to the halting place of the whole party; he knew
that during the last minutes she had formed determinations which
would take her as soon as possible to her other tasks; and she
accepted that in her answer.
“I’m going to Montdidier--unless it seems better to make for Amiens;
then to Paris as soon as I can.”
“I see.” He gazed away and up in the air where machines with the
tricolor circle of the allies were flying; and hastily he offered
Ruth his hand. “Good-bye, Cynthia,” he said.
“Good-bye, Gerry.”
“Cynthia, when you’re in Paris you’ll stay there?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you do, where’ll you be?”
“Milicent’s kept our room in the _pension_ on the Rue des Saints
Pères. I’ll be with her again, I think.”
“All right! Look out for yourself!”
“You try to, too!”
She kept the car standing a few seconds longer watching him while,
with his arm about the old man’s shoulder, he hobbled toward the
flying field. Several minutes later, when she was far down the road,
she gazed back, and saw a combat biplane rise from the field with
what seemed to be particular impatience, and she imagined that he
was piloting that machine. She had passed now from the zone of the
broken front, where all the effort was to throw men--any number and
any sort of men--across the path of the victorious German advance to
the region of retreat, where every sinew and every sense was
strained in the attempt to get men, and guns, and supplies out of
the area of envelopment by the enemy. And dreadful and appalling as
it had been to witness men--too few men and unsupported--moving
forward to immolate themselves in hopeless effort to stay that
German advance, yet it had not been so terrible to Ruth as this
sight and sound of retreat. For the sound--the beat of feet upon the
road, the ceaseless tramp of retreating men, the rumble of guns and
combat trains going back, then the beat, beat, beat of the
retreat--continued into the darkness, when Ruth no longer could see
the road from the little house where she rested. All through the
night it continued till it seemed to Ruth, not something human, but
a cataclysm of nature flowing before a more mighty catastrophe which
no one and nothing could stop.
Whenever she awoke she heard it; and through the dreams which
harassed the heavy periods of her stupor of exhaustion which served
that night for sleep, that beat of the feet throbbed and throbbed.
Ruth reached Montdidier at noon of the next day. It was at
Montdidier, accordingly, that she first learned the true magnitude
of the disaster and first heard openly spoken what had been said
only in part before; and that was that the fate of France and of the
allied cause depended now upon the Americans. If they could not
quickly arrive in great force and if, having arrived, they proved
unable to fight on even terms with the Germans, all was lost. France
would not yet give up, in any case; England would hold on; but,
without America, they were beaten.
And during that day, and through the next, and the next, while Ruth
was unable to leave Montdidier, the disaster grew until it was known
that the British Fifth Army, as an organized force, had ceased to
exist and the Germans, in this single great stroke, had advanced
thirty-five miles and claimed the capture of thirteen hundred guns
and ninety thousand men.
On Monday, as the Germans yet advanced and moved on Montdidier, Ruth
was in a column of refugees again; she was obliged to abandon her
determined task for the duty of the moment offered to her hands. She
got to Compiègne and there was delayed. Roye, Noyon, Montdidier all
now were taken; and the wounded from that southern flank of the
salient which thrust west toward Amiens were coming back upon
Compiègne; and no man yet could say that the disaster was halted.
But Foch had come to the command.
Ruth had tried to learn from men who had returned from the region
where she had left Gerry Hull, what his fate might have been. She
knew that he had been flying and fighting again, for she read in one
of the bulletins which was being issued, that he had been cited in
the orders of the day for Monday; but she learned nothing at all
about him after that until the day after the announcement that all
allied armies were to be under the supreme command of General Foch.
It was Friday, eight days after that first Thursday morning of mist,
and surprise, and catastrophe; and still the Germans fought their
way forward; but for two days now the French had arrived, and were
present in force from Noyon to Moreuil, and for two days the gap
between the British and the French, which the German break-through
had opened, had been closed.
Gerry upon that day was detailed with a squadron whose airdrome had
been moved beyond Ribecourt; he had been flying daily, and had
fought an engagement that morning, and after returning from his
afternoon reconnaissance over Noyon he had been ordered to rest, as
the situation was becoming sufficiently stabilized to end the long
strain of his too constant flights. Accordingly, he left late in the
afternoon for Compiègne to look for the field hospital where Agnes
Ertyle would be at work. The original site of her tents had been far
within the zone which the Germans had retaken; and Gerry had heard
that she had done wonders during the moving of the wounded.
He found her on duty, as he knew she would be; she was a trifle
thinner than before, perhaps; her cool, firm hand clasped his just a
bit tensely; her calm, observant eyes were slightly brighter; but
she was in complete control of herself, as she always was, quite
unconfused--even when two nurses came at the same time for emergency
directions--and quite efficient.
After a while she was able to give him a little time alone; and they
sat in a tent and talked. Gerry had not seen her or heard from her
since the beginning of the battle, and he found her almost
overwhelmed with the completeness of the British defeat and the
destruction of the Fifth Army. She herself knew and her father, who
was dead, had been a close friend of the commanding officers who
were held responsible for the disaster; and together with the shock
of the defeat, went sympathy for them. They were being removed; and
even the English commander-in-chief no longer had supreme command of
his own men.
“It’s the greatest thing the allies have yet done--one command,”
Gerry said. “We ought to have had it long ago; if we had, the Boche
never would have done what they just have. When you had your own
army and your own command, and the French had theirs, you each kept
your own reserve; and, of course, Ludendorf knew it. Haig expected
an attack upon his part of the front, so he had to keep his reserve
to himself on his part of the line to be ready for it; the French
looked for an attack on their sectors, so they kept their reserves
to themselves; so wherever Ludendorf struck with all his reserves,
he knew he’d meet only half of ours and that it would take five
days--as it did--for the other half to come up. Now one
commander-in-chief, like Foch, can stop all that.”
“I can believe it was necessary and, therefore, best,” Lady Agnes
said. “Yet I can’t stop being sorry--not merely for our general
officers, but for our men, too. Poor chaps who come to me; they’ve
fought so finely for England; and now the Boche are boasting they’ve
whipped them and beaten England. They everyone of them are so eager
to get well, and go back, and have at them again, and rather show
the Boche that they’ve not--rather show them that England will have
them! Now we’ll not be under our own command; yet we’ll be fighting
just the same for England; the Boche shall find that England will
have them!”
“You’ll have them!” Gerry assured. “And far quicker than you could
have before.”
Lady Agnes observed him, a little puzzled. “You used to say ‘we’
when you spoke of us,” she said gently.
Gerry flushed. “I was in your army then,” he replied.
“You’re fighting with us now--wonderfully, Gerry.”
“Yes; but technically you see, Agnes, I’m with my own forces.”
He said “my own” with a tone of distinction which surprised himself.
His own forces, except for a few comrade pilots, and for those
engineers who had grabbed rifles, and got into this battle, and
except for those girls--those “awfully good” girls of Picardy--still
were only in training in France or holding down quiet sectors in
Lorraine. But Gerry had been in one of those sectors which had not
been so noted for its tranquillity after “his own” forces had
arrived.
However, he was not thinking of those forces just then; he was
recalling an American girl who had come to him across open ground in
the sunlight and under machine-gun fire. For a moment he visualized
her as she stumbled and rolled forward, when he thought she was hit;
then he saw her close beside him with the sun on her glorious hair
and her eyes all anxious for him. Words of hers came to him when
Lady Agnes was speaking again her regret that the English could not
have kept their own command.
“Oh, I don’t know how to say it!” that American girl’s words
repeated themselves to Gerry; she was in a yellow dress now, with
bare arms and neck, and quite warm and flushed with her intentness
to explain to him something he could not understand at all. “But at
first France was fighting as France and for France against Germany;
and England, for England, was doing the same. And America couldn’t
do that--I mean fight for America. She couldn’t join with allies who
were fighting for themselves, or even for each other. The side of
the allies had to become more than that before we could go in; and
it is and we’re in!”
Gerry was understanding that better, now. This unification of the
command, and the yielding of the British was their greatest earnest
of that change which Cynthia Gail had felt before, and gloried in,
and which Agnes Ertyle accepted but yet deplored.
More wounded came streaming back from the battle and Lady Agnes
returned to duty immediately. “That Miss Gail, who was on the Ribot
with us, was in Compiègne the other day,” Agnes told him when he was
saying good-bye. “She’s doing marvels in sorting out refugees, I
hear.”
Gerry had been wondering often during the last days about what might
have happened to Cynthia; and he had inquired of several people. But
he had not thought that Lady Agnes might know.
“She was working at a relief headquarters on Rue Solférino, near the
Place de l’Hôtel de Ville.”
Gerry wandered into Compiègne, finding the Rue Solférino, which was
the main street of the city, more crowded and congested than ever
before. From the throng before the doors, Gerry quickly located the
quarters near the Hôtel de Ville where Cynthia Gail had been working
and, forcing a way in, he spied a yellow head bent over a little boy
and he heard a gentle, sweet voice speaking, in newly learned
French, interrogations about where the child last had seen his
mother, whether he had aunt or uncle and so on. Gerry went farther
in and made himself known; and when the girl looked up and saw him,
an older American woman--Mrs. Mayhew--looked up, and she observed
not only Gerry but the girl also.
“Hello,” Ruth said. It was a poor word to encompass all she was
feeling at that moment, which was, first, joy and relief that he was
safe; next, that he had come there to seek her. But the word did, as
it many, many times had done before; and he used the same to
encompass what he felt. “Have you had anything to eat tonight?” he
added after his greeting. He suspected not.
“I’ll have supper later, thanks,” Ruth said.
“You will not,” Mrs. Mayhew put in. “You can come back after supper,
if you must; but you go out now. Take her with you, Gerry.”
Which was a command which Gerry obeyed. So they sat together at a
little table in a café, much crowded, and very noisy, and where they
supped in haste; for there was a great multitude to be served. But
they were very light-hearted.
“You’ve heard the great news about our army?” Ruth asked.
“That we’re going to be under the command of General Foch like the
English?”
“Better than that,” Ruth said. “General Pershing has offered all our
forces to the French to use in any way they wish. He’s offered to
break up our brigades, or even our regiments and companies, and let
the French and English brigade our regiments with them, or take our
men as individuals into their ranks, or use us any way they want,
which will help to win. They’re not to think about us--our pride--at
all. They’re just to take us--in any way to help.”
“No,” said Gerry. “I hadn’t heard that.”
“It’s just announced,” Ruth told him. “I’d just heard. He did it
under the instructions and with the approval of our government. I
think--I think it’s the finest, most unselfish offer a nation ever
made! All we have in any way that’s best for the cause!”
Gerry sat back while hot rills of prickling blood tingled to his
temples. “I think so, too, Cynthia,” he said. And again that evening
words of hers, spoken long ago, seized him. “Oh, I don’t know how or
when it will appear; but I know that before long you will be prouder
to be an American than you ever dreamed you could be!”
Part of that pride was coming to him, then, incredible as it would
have seemed to him even a few days ago, when in the midst of
disaster unparalleled and due to the tardiness of his country. For,
though his country had not come in till so late, now it was offering
itself in a spirit unknown in national relations before.
When they had finished their supper, he brought her back to her work
and himself returned to his airdrome. The next day Ruth found a
chance to journey to Paris.
For information--accurate, dependable word of German intentions and
German preparations for the next attack--was the paramount essential
now. This first assault at last was stopped; but only after
tremendous catastrophe; and the Germans still possessed superiority
in physical strength as great as before. And they owned, even more
than before, confidence in themselves, while the allies’ at least
had been shaken. The Germans kept also, undoubtedly, the same powers
of secrecy which had enabled them to launch their tremendous
onslaught as a surprise to the allies, while they themselves
accurately had reckoned the allied strength and dispositions.
Ruth did not hope, by herself, to change all that. The wild dreams
of the girl who had taken up the bold enterprise offered her in
Chicago, had become tempered by experience, which let her know the
limits within which one person might work in this war; but the
probability that she would be unable to do greatly only increased
her will to do whatever she could.
Thus she returned to Paris to endeavor to encounter again the enemy
agents who would send her through Switzerland into Germany. As she
knew nothing of them, she must depend upon their seeking her; so she
went at once to her old room in the _pension_ upon the Rue des
Saints Pères. Arriving late in the afternoon, she found Milicent
home from work--a Milicent who put arms about her and cried over her
in relief that she was safe. Then Milicent brought her a cablegram.
“This came while you were gone, dear. I opened it and tried to
forward it to you.”
Ruth went white and her heart halted with fear. Had something
happened at home--to her mother or to her sisters?
“What is it?”
“Your brother’s badly wounded. He’s here in a hospital, Cynthia!”
“My brother!” Ruth cried. It had come to her as Cynthia Gail, of
course. She had thought, when nearing the _pension_, that probably
she would find an accumulation of mail to which, as Cynthia, she
must reply. But she had been Cynthia so long now that she had almost
ceased to fear an emergency. Her brother, of course, was Charles
Gail, who had quarreled with his father and of whom nothing had been
heard for four years.
Ruth took the message and learned that Charles had been with the
Canadians since the start of the war; he had enlisted under an
assumed name; but when wounded and brought to Paris, he had given
his real name and asked that his parents be informed. The
information had reached them; so his father had cabled Cynthia to
try to see Charles before he died.
“I told Lieutenant Byrne about it,” Milicent said to Ruth.
“Lieutenant Byrne?”
“Why, yes; wasn’t that right? He called here for you last week; and
several times since. He said he was engaged to you; why--isn’t he?”
“Yes, he was. That’s all right,” Ruth said.
“So he’s been about to see your brother.”
“How is he? Charles, I mean, of course.”
“He was still living yesterday.”
“Lieutenant Byrne is still here?”
“As far as I know, he is.”