Gerry was in his seat and starting his motor so he just heard that; he rose from the field and for several moments all his conscious attention was given to catching proper formation with the machines returning along with him to the battle; but subconsciously his mind was going to those girls, the American girls--those “awfully good” girls out that way. He did not know what they might be doing this day--what it was which won from the English pilot the praise in his voice. Gerry had known that American girls had been out “that way,” he had known about the Smith College girls, particularly--the score or so who called themselves the Smith College Relief Unit and who, he understood, had been supplying the poor peasants and looking after old people and children and doing all sorts of practical and useful things in little villages about Nesle and Ham. He did not know any of those girls; but he did know Cynthia Gail; and now, as he found himself in flight formation and flying evenly, thought of her emerged more vividly than it had previously upon that morning. When the news had reached him far away on the evening before that the Germans had broken through in that neighborhood where she was, he had visualized her in his fears as a helpless victim before the enemy’s advance. The instincts she had stirred in him were to hurry him to her protection; that morning as he had looked down upon the refugees on the roads, mentally he had put her among the multitude fleeing and to be defended. But the shout of the English pilot had made Gerry think of her as one of those protecting--not precisely a combatant, perhaps, but certainly no mere non-combatant. Of course the English pilot had not mentioned Cynthia Gail; but Gerry knew that if American girls were proving themselves that morning, Cynthia Gail was one of them. He had been able, in vivid moments, to see Agnes Ertyle; for he knew exactly what she would be doing; but his imagination had failed to bring before him Cynthia Gail. In the subconscious considerations which through the violence of his physical actions dwelt on such ideas, this failure had seemed proof that Agnes Ertyle alone stirred the deepest within him; but now those visions of the unseen which came quite unbidden and which he could not control showed him again and again the smooth-skinned, well-formed face with the blue, brave eyes under thoughtful brows, and the slender, rounded figure of the girl whom he knew as Cynthia Gail. And whereas previously he had merely included her among the many in peril, now dismay for her particularly throbbed through him. Her words when they last were together--“A score or so of you felt you had to do the fighting for a hundred million of us; but you haven’t now, for we’re coming; a good many of us are here”--no longer seemed a mere appeal to him to spare himself; it told him that she was among those on the ground endeavoring to govern the fate of this day.