Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/358

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338
RUTH OF THE U. S. A.

tioned by other men. Then she was taken to Paris and was left, undisturbed by further examinations, to rest in a bed in a little private room at one of the hospitals. She could not quite determine, during those first days that she was detained there, whether she was in fact under a sort of observational arrest or whether the constant care which she received was solely to promote the return of her strength.

For a semi-collapse had come—collapse of only physical powers. Her mind was ceaselessly active—too active, the doctor told her. Sometimes at night she could not sleep, but demanded that she be allowed to rise, and dress, and go to the intelligence officers, or have them come to her, so she could tell them her whole story again in a way they must believe.

If she could only make them see how Adler had looked; if she could make them hear how his voice had sounded when he had spoken of that Soissons-Reims front, they would not doubt her at all. If she could speak with Gerry Hull again, perhaps he could help make them believe her. But Gerry Hull was with his squadron. Only women were about Ruth now, and doctors, and wounded men. So, day after day, she was kept in bed awaiting the attack which—as all the world knows—came on the twenty-seventh of May and against the French on the front from Soissons to Reims.

The day the great assault began Ruth demanded to get up, and—it seemed until that day that someone must have doubted her—at last she was permitted to do as she pleased. So she returned to the Rue des Saints Pères and to her old rooms with Milicent; she wore again the khaki