“Well,” he said, “I’m here; what do you want me to do?” “You’ll do it for me, Gerry?” “What?” “Help me to Switzerland.” “Still as Cynthia Gail, of course.” “Yes.” “Then you turn into--whom?” “The German girl whom they will take into Germany.” “I suppose so. But who is she? Where does she come from? What is her name?” “I don’t know.” “What?” “She came from Chicago, I suppose.” “You suppose; and you don’t know even her name and intend to try to be her!” “It’s possible, Gerry; oh it’s possible, truly. You see I don’t believe the Germans here in Paris, or those who’ll meet me in Switzerland, know who I’m supposed to be.” “What do you think they’ll know?” “That the girl who’s here going under the name of Cynthia Gail, and doing the work I’m doing, is really one of themselves and that she’ll appear in Lucerne. Those are the essentials; and so far as I’ve been able to observe the German-spy system--and you see I’ve been a part of it for a while----” “Yes; I see.” “--it seems pretty well reduced to communicating just essentials. Of course I’ve prepared a German-American name and identity for myself. If they really know anything in Germany about the girl whom their Chicago people sent here, they’ll have me; but if they don’t, I’ll get on. That’s the part I’ve really been preparing myself for all these months, Gerry; just being Cynthia Gail here was--nothing.” He felt himself jerk and recoil at that. Had she been playing a part with him all this time as well as to others; had this being his been only a rôle which she had acted? “I see,” he said to her curtly. “Oh, not nothing to me, Gerry, in the things I’ve had to do when I wrote Cynthia’s mother and father and when I had to write George Byrne and when I’ve been seeing her brother. I meant that deceiving Hubert and his aunt and her friends here and the rest and you, Gerry, was--” she did not finish. “Quite simple,” he completed for her with relief. So the deception with him had not been hard because, in what would have been hard, she had not deceived him. “Where’s Hubert?” Gerry questioned now. “I don’t know. I don’t think he’s in Paris, now.” “You haven’t heard from him recently?” “He sent me several postals when I was at Mirevaux; I’ve not heard from him since.” “Then he knows nothing whatever about this?” “He doesn’t know that George Byrne found me, Gerry; but he knows I’m not Cynthia Gail.” “Ah! So you told him some time ago, did you?” Jealousy of Hubert now leaped in him; Hubert had known of her what he could not know. “I didn’t tell him; or I didn’t mean to, Gerry,” Ruth explained. “He knew about me--that is, about Cynthia Gail, of course--and he asked me questions on the train coming here from Bordeaux which I had to answer and answered wrongly.” “Oh; he caught you, then; he told you so!”