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!”