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
