The roar of the airplane continued overhead; and Ruth now knew the trick. It was keeping the Germans below while Gerry and his companion went through the _schloss_. Ruth did not yet have complete comprehension of the event; she supposed that Gerry must have escaped from Germany long before; that he had rejoined his squadron and had come from the allied lines with the raiders that night. Now they were out of the _schloss_ and Gerry was leading her over soft ground--a field brightly lit by the moon. “Gerry, I’ve their plan!” Ruth cried to him. “On the front between Soissons and Reims; their next attack! I know it....” He no longer was leading her. He lifted her and bundled her against him, quite as he had done once so long before. An airplane was approaching; she could hear the loud crescendo of its motor; suddenly it ceased and she heard only the whir of the airscrew of a machine about to land. Gerry was speaking to her, but for some reason she could not understand what he was saying; she could hear his words, but they were separate sort of words without meaning. He and Mike were lifting her now and lowering her feet first into a pit--the seat pit of an airplane. Mike stepped down into the pit with her and supported her there. Gerry was gone from her now, but not far away. He was in the pilot’s pit, or just behind it, with the pilot in front of him. The motor was roaring again; the machine was moving; it was rising. She was flying! Far--far below, when she looked back, she saw a strange sheen, which was the moonlight on the ground, with a twisting, brighter strip dividing it. “That,” she tried to say to the man holding her in his lap, “that’s the Rhine?” He tried very hard to hear her, and she supposed that the same thing must be the matter with him as was the trouble with her when Gerry spoke to her on the ground. Only slowly she realized that she could not even hear her own voice for the noise of the motor. She looked back to the other pit and saw Gerry’s face; he waved at her and she waved back; then she sank upon the shoulder of the man holding her, and she lost consciousness. Many times while that English bombing biplane--weighted now by three men and a girl instead of by two men and bombs--made the journey to the allied lines, Ruth stirred to semi-wakefulness. The swaying and the rising and the falling of the airplane as it rode the currents of the air made it seem to Ruth that she was upon a ship at sea--upon the _Ribot_. At other times the motion seemed merely the buoyancy following the sinking of sensations in a dream. Afterwards she remembered sitting up, wide-eyed and collected in mind, and gazing down upon the moonlit ground; but at the time these occasions gave no reaction.