Tomorrow--or perhaps even today--the enemy might take her out and kill her. And while death--her individual, personal annihilation--had become a matter of amazingly small account, yet the recognition that with death must come withdrawal, perhaps, even from knowledge of how the battle was going upon that line where the fate of all the world was at stake, where Britons and French fought as she had seen them fight, and where, at last, America was arriving--that crushed her down to her pallet and with despair quite overwhelmed her. So she set herself to thinking of Gerry. He was alive, perhaps; a prisoner, therefore, and to be returned some day when the war was over, to marry Lady Agnes, while she.... Ruth did not shudder when she thought of herself dead. Perhaps Gerry was dead; then she would be going at once to join him. And if they merely took her out and shot her today, or tomorrow, or some day soon, without doing anything more to her than that, she might find Gerry and rejoin him, much as she had been when he had known her and--yes--liked her. Without having suffered indignity, that was. These cold stones seemed at least to assure her of this. So she lay and thought of him while the slit of light crept slowly from left to right as the sun swung to the west and she listened for the step of those who would come to her cell. CHAPTER XX: AN OFFICERS’ PRISON Gerry, when shot down over the German lines, had succeeded in making that “some sort of landing” which his comrades had reported. There was an axiom, taught in the training camps to give confidence to cadets, which said that when a pilot once gets his wheels squarely on the ground, he will not be killed, though his machine may be badly smashed. Gerry, in his landing, had tested this axiom to its utmost; for he had had sufficient control of his ship, at the last, to put his wheels square to the ground; and though his machine was wholly wrecked, he was not killed. He was painfully shaken and battered; but so excellently was his ship planned to protect the pilot in a “crash,” that he was not even seriously injured. Indeed, after the German soldiers dragged him out he was able to stand--and was quite able, so the German intelligence officers decided, to undergo an ordeal intended to make him divulge information. This ordeal failed, as it failed with all brave men taken prisoners; and Gerry was given escort out of the zone of the armies and put upon a train for a German prison camp. With him were an American infantry lieutenant and two French officers.