Marriage was something very far ahead in the future, if Ruth or Helen thought of it at all. And it was quite a surprise to them that Jennie Stone should have so suddenly become engaged. Indeed, the plump girl was one of “the old crowd” that the girl of the Red Mill had not supposed would become early engaged. “Heavy” Stone was not openly of a sentimental character.
But when, through Ruth, the plump girl had become acquainted with the Countess Marchand’s younger son, Jennie Stone had been carried quite off her feet by the young Frenchman’s precipitous courtship.
“Talk about the American boys being ‘sudden’! Theirs is nothing to the whirlwind work of Henri Marchand!” exclaimed Helen.
Jennie and Helen Cameron had been going back and forth to Clair as affairs permitted during the past few months; therefore Jennie had become acquainted with the Countess and was now more often a visitor at the old château than at the hospital.
The country about Clair had quieted down during the past two months; and for a long time previous to this fateful day when our story opens, the war had touched the town but slightly save as the ambulances rolled in now and then with wounded from the field hospitals.
Gradually the roar of the cannon had retreated. The Yankees were forcing the fighting on this front and had pressed the Germans back, slowly but surely. The last and greatest German offensive had broken down, and now Marshal Foch had started his great drive which was to shatter utterly the foe’s western front.
By some foul chance the German bombing plane had escaped the watchful French and American airplanes at the front, had crossed the fighting lines, and had reached Clair with its single building of mark—the hospital. The Hun raider deliberately dropped his cargo of explosives on and around this building of mercy.
In broad daylight the red crosses painted upon the roofs of the several departments of the institution were too plainly seen from the air for the Hun to have made a mistake. It was a deliberate expression of German “frightfulness.”
But the bomb, which in exploding had crushed inward the window of Ruth Fielding’s little sleeping cell, was the final one dropped from the enemy plane. The machine droned away, pursued by the two or three airplanes that had spiraled up to attack it.
Enough damage had been done, however. As Helen Cameron and Jennie Stone scrambled up from the floor of the corridor outside Ruth’s door their united screams brought the little Madame la Directrice of the hospital to their aid.