She started up, blinking in the sunlight. He had been shot down again, in truth. This was Germany; and he was in Germany; the enemy had him—von Forstner's boasting voice was saying it—dead or a prisoner. She shuddered and closed her eyes to see, again, Gerry Hull's face. She seemed to be looking up at him; he was in blue-gray—his French uniform. Palms and roses were behind him. They were in Mrs. Corliss' conservatory together, their first time alone.
"You're not like anyone else here," he was saying to her. "That's why I needed to see you again. . . . What is it, Cynthia Gail?" A queer, warm little thrill went through her; she seemed to be still looking up at him, his arms were about her now; he was carrying her. They were upon the Ribot and she was telling him that she would have gone into the sea to get anyone—anyone at all. Now, "Ruth—Ruth Alden!" he was saying. Her own name; and he liked to repeat it. "They shan't!" he was holding her so fiercely. "They shan't!" Now he kissed her hand. Her fingers of her other hand closed gently over the hand he had kissed; so, in the sunlight at the base of a tree high upon the mountainside above Lauengratz in the Black Forest of Baden, at last she fell asleep.
Not soundly nor for extended periods; a score of times she stirred and started up at sounds made by the breeze or at the passage of some small forest animal. Once a human footfall aroused her; and she was amazed to learn how delicate her hearing had been made by alarm when she discovered how distant the man was. He bore an ax; and evidently he was a Russian or perhaps a French
