None followed her that night. She admitted to Milicent, when
questioned, that she had met Lieutenant Byrne upon the street and
they had walked together; Ruth said also that she had seen her
brother. Milicent evidently ascribed her agitation to a quarrel with
Byrne.
Ruth lay awake most of that night. The morning paper which Milicent
and she read contained no mention, amid the tremendous news from the
front, of the attack upon an American officer in a ruined house; and
no consequences threatened Ruth that morning. She planned for a
while to try to trace Byrne and learn whether he had regained
consciousness; then she abandoned that purpose. She was satisfied,
from one of those instincts which baffle question, that Byrne lived;
and it would be only a question of time before he must accuse her.
Yet she might have time enough to leave Paris and France--to get
away into Switzerland and into Germany. For the fact that a German
had for her attempted to strike her accuser dead was final proof
that the Germans had not connected her with the betrayal of De
Trevenac; they believed that she had been in Picardy all this time
on account of orders given her by De Trevenac.
It was possible, of course, that the German who had struck for her
and whom she had pursued, would now himself suspect her. Yet her
flight after him might have seemed to him only her ruse to escape.
What he had last said to her, she must receive as her orders from
the Germans in Paris. “Away to Switzerland!”
That concurred with the sentence of instruction given upon that page
which she had received with her passport that cold January morning
in Chicago.... “You will report in person, via Switzerland; apply
for passport to Lucerne.”
At this moment when, for the cause of her country and its allies,
she had determined that she must make the attempt to go on to
Germany, the Germans were ready to have her. And that was easy to
understand; she had spent weeks going about freely behind the newly
formed English and French lines which bagged back about the immense
salient which the Germans had thrust toward Amiens; she was
supposed, as a German, to have ready report about the strength of
those lines as seen from the rear, of the strength of the support,
the morale of soldiers and civilians and the thousand other details
which the enemy desired to know.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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