“Yes,” was the quiet reply. “We all have our big moments. Your big moment too will arrive, perhaps sooner than you think.” “Will it?” Norma asked herself. There was no answer. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XVIII SUDDEN PANIC When Norma awoke, a half hour before her regular time, next morning, it was with the feeling of one who has had her little world of thought turned topsy-turvy. “It is Lena who has done it,” she told herself. Yet she could not hate Lena for that. It is not easy to hate any person who in the past twenty-four hours has saved your life. Lena, she was sure, had done just that. Neither she nor Betty could have brought the boat safely home through that storm. And yet, when she had seen Lena in the big living room the night before, after dinner, and had tried to thank her, Lena had shrugged, mumbling something about, “All in a day’s work,” and “Handled a boat before,” then had walked away. “You’d think she was a man,” Norma had said to Betty later. “That’s the way men talk.” “We’ve given her rather a cold shoulder,” was Betty’s quiet comment. “It wouldn’t be surprising if she paid us back in cold shoulders.” “Well,” Norma had started to reply, “perhaps we had reasons. We—” She had gone no farther and, appearing to understand, Betty had not encouraged her to continue. “But life with Lena has been strange,” she told herself now. Yes, there had been the whispered words on that first night at Fort Des Moines, Lena’s apparent friendship with the Spanish hairdresser and that startling affair of the self-locking door at night in a Des Moines repair shop. Then, too, she had quite recently heard a man at the back of the photographer’s studio say, “You must!” and had heard a voice, which she was sure must be Lena’s say, “I will not!” That Lena was there at the photographer’s studio at one time or another was certain, for a picture had been taken there for her identification card. “But why not?” Norma whispered now, almost fiercely. What did she, Norma, have against that photographer. He was undoubtedly a German, yet there were hundreds of thousands of loyal German-Americans. He looked like her mental picture of a spy she had heard Lieutenant Warren tell about, yet her mental picture of that spy of India might be all wrong. She had never seen him. Both these men were photographers, yet there were many like them in the world. Both kept black pigeons. She didn’t know a great deal about pigeons so, for all she knew, there might be a million black ones in America. Even the Spanish hairdresser had not been convicted of espionage. She had disappeared from Fort Des Moines, that was all. Some woman, with a Spanish look, had showed up at night at the Sea Tower with a faked identification card and dressed in a WAC uniform. But was this the Spanish hairdresser? Who could answer that question?