"Well! I do declare!" exclaimed the fleshy girl, tossing her head. "I suppose the duty will devolve upon me to eat all the blessés' fancy food for them. Dear me, Ruthie Fielding! Don't stay long. For if you do I shall utterly ruin my figure."
It was very kind of the girls to agree to Ruth's suggestion, and she appreciated it. But she could not tell them anything about what she was to do while she was absent from the hospital.
Indeed, she barely knew herself what she would do—in detail, that is. She had put herself in the hands of Major Marchand and must wait to hear from him.
She dared not breathe to Helen a word of Tom's trouble. Nobody must know that she, Ruth, hoped in some way to aid him to escape from beyond the German lines.
It seemed almost impossible for a girl—any girl—to pass from one side of the battle front to the other. From the sea on the Belgian coast to the Alps the trenches ran in continuous lines. Division after division of Belgians, British and their colonial troops, French, and Americans held the trenches on this side, facing a great horde of Germans.
In places the huge guns stood so close together they all but touched. Beyond these were the front trenches, in which the sharpshooters and the machine-gun men watched the enemy. And beyond again were the listening posts and the wire entanglements.
How could a girl ever get through the jungle of barbed wire? And in places the Huns had strung live wires, carrying voltages strong enough to kill a man, just as they did along the borderland of Holland.
When Ruth thought of these things she lost hope. But she tried not to think at all. Major Marchand had bade her be of good hope.
She kept her mind occupied in showing the two girls their duties and in introducing them to such of the nurses and other workers as Ruth herself knew well.
It was rather late in the afternoon, and she had heard no word of the major, when Ruth and her two friends came out of a lower ward to the main entrance of the hospital just as an ambulance rolled in. Two of the brancardiers came out of the hospital and drew forth one stretcher on which a convalescent patient lay.