The feeling of dreamland incredulity that she, Ruth Alden, could actually be experiencing those gloriously exciting days upon the _Ribot_ and following her arrival in France had been supplanted by sensations which made it seem that these last weeks had been the only real ones in her life. When she thought of her old self--of that strange, shadowy, almost substanceless girl who used to work in a Madison Street real estate office for Sam Hilton--it was her life in Chicago which had become incredible. She did not, therefore, forget her own home; on the contrary, her work which had been largely the gathering together of scattered family groups and the attempt to reestablish homes, had made her dwell with particular poignancy upon memories of the little house in Onarga where her mother and her sisters dwelt. Regularly Ruth had addressed a letter to her mother and dropped it in a post-box; she had dared tell nothing of herself or of her work or give any address by which anyone could trace her. She simply endeavored to send to her mother assurance that she was well and in France. Obviously she could not receive reply from her mother; indeed, Ruth could have no knowledge that any of her letters ever reached home. She experienced the dreads which every loving person feels when no news can come; such experience was only part of the common lot there in France; but it helped to remove her life at home further into the past. Switzerland, strangely and without warning, had undone much that France and the battle zone had worked within Ruth; the inevitable relaxing of the strain of work in a country at war had returned Ruth to earlier emotions. What was she, Ruth Alden, doing here alone in the Alps? She was standing, as one in a dream, upon the quay before the splendid hotels of Lucerne and gazing over the blue, wonderful, mountain-mirroring waters of the Lac des Quatre Cantons. Off to the southwest, grand and rugged against the azure sky, rose the snow-capped peaks of Pilatus; to the east, glistening and more smiling under the spring sun, lay the Rigi. The beauty and wonder of it was beyond anything which Ruth Alden could have known. Who was she that she was there? Then a boy came by with newspapers and she bought a German newspaper and one printed in French at Bern. It was this one which informed her, when she glanced down its columns, that Gerry Hull had been shot down, and, strangely--and mercifully, perhaps--this knowledge came not to the girl who, during the past months had been his friend, his close comrade during days most recent; it seemed to come, somehow, only to a girl who lay awake early in the morning in a shabby room at an Ontario Street boarding house, a girl who day-dreamed about impossible happenings such as knowing Gerry Hull, but who soon must stir to go down to breakfast at the disorderly table in the ill-lit room below and then catch a crowded car for Sam Hilton’s office.