As the girls waited an answer to their summons, Henriette said, in reference to what had already passed in conversation between them:
"It hurts me, dear friend, that anybody should doubt the loyalty of our countess whom we know to be so good. Why! there are people even wicked enough to connect her with that—that awful Thing we know of," and the girl dropped her voice and looked suddenly around her, as though she feared an unseen presence.
"As though she were a werwolf," she added, with a shudder.
"Pooh!" and Ruth Fielding laughed. "Nobody in their senses would connect Madame la Countess with such tales, having once seen her."
She thought now, as they waited, of her first visit to the chateau, and of the appearance of the Countess Marchand in her bare library. Whatever her sons might be—the young count who was missing, or this major whom she had just met in the grassy lane—Ruth Fielding was confident that the lady of the chateau was a loyal subject of France, and that she was trusted by the Government.
Ruth had called here herself on that occasion with a secret agent, Monsieur Lafrane, to clear up the mystery of a trio of criminals who had come from America to prey upon the Red Cross. These crooks had succeeded in robbing the Supply Department of the Red Cross, in which Ruth herself was engaged. But in the end they had fallen into the toils of the French secret service and Ruth had aided in their overthrow.
All this is told in the volume of this series immediately preceding our present story, entitled: "Ruth Fielding in the Red Cross; or, Doing Her Best for Uncle Sam." This was the thirteenth volume of the Ruth Fielding Series.
Of the twelve books that have gone before that only a brief mention can be made while Ruth and the young French girl are waiting for an answer to the bell.
At first we meet Ruth Fielding as she approaches Cheslow and the Red Mill beside the Lumano River, where Uncle Jabez, the miserly miller, awaits her coming in no pleasant frame of mind. He is her only living relative and he considers little Ruth Fielding a "charity child." She is made to feel this by his treatment and by the way in which the girls in the district school talk of her.
Ruth makes three friends from the start, however, who, in their several ways, help her to endure her troubles. One is Aunt Alvirah Boggs, who is nobody's relation but everybody's aunt, and whom Jabez Potter, the miller, has taken from the poorhouse to keep his home tidy and comfortable. Aunt Alvirah sees the good underlying miserly Uncle Jabez's character when nobody else can. She lavishes upon the little orphan girl all the love and affection that she would have given to her own children had she been blessed with any.