Ruth delayed only the instant necessary to make certain that he had gone upstairs. Suspicion which now turned upon Dittman and upon the Russians swiftly must approach her; moreover, the hour of arrival of Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch was almost here. By her stroke of boldness and of luck she had succeeded in temporarily overreaching the secretary whom she had found so unbalanced by the death of his superior. But she could not possibly hope to dupe von Fallenbosch. She must fail with him as miserably as she had failed with von Forstner. And to attempt with him and to fail involved, now, not only her own destruction but delivery into German hands of that most essential information which she had intercepted, and loss to the allies of the knowledge of German plans. She opened the drawer which Adler had just closed and she took out the sheets of von Forstner’s reports and the stencils. She went out into the hall and, finding it empty, she passed quickly to a door on the side of the house which, she believed, was not commanded from the windows of the room where Captain von Forstner’s body lay. In that direction, also, the forest lay nearer to the house; Ruth went out and walked toward the trees. An impulse to run almost controlled her, but she realized that she must be in sight of servants, who might not question her strolling out away from the house in the warm spring sunshine but who would immediately report anything which resembled flight. So she went slowly until she reached the forest; then she ran--wildly and breathlessly. She found a path, well marked and much used and easy to run upon. Other paths, almost overgrown, opened into it here and there. Ruth ran by the first few of these; then, choosing arbitrarily, she took one of the disused ways which twisted north--she noticed--through denser thickets of budding oaks and beeches; it ascended, too, bending back and forth up a mountainside which brought the darker boughs of the black firs drooping about her while, underfoot, the ground alternately became stony bare and soft with velvety cushions of pine needles. She stopped at last, exhausted and gasping; her pulses were pounding so in her head that she scarcely could hear, and the forest on every side limited sight. But so far as she could see and as well as she could hear there was no alarm of anyone following her. It seemed absolutely still on the mountainside except for the movement of the noon breeze in the tree tops; now from somewhere far away and off to the right she heard the ring of an ax and, after a minute, the fall of a tree; now the sound of the ax again. CHAPTER XIX: THE UNDERGROUND RAILWAY