But, to Ruth’s mind, Tom’s need was greater than anything else just then. In her walks about Clair she had become acquainted with a French girl who drove a motor-car—Henriette Dupay. Her father was one of the larger farmers, and the family lived in a beautiful old house some distance out of town. Ruth made a brief toilet, a briefer breakfast, and ran out of the hospital, taking the lane that led to the Dupay farm.
The fog was so thick close to the ground that she could not see people in the road until she was almost upon them. But, then, it was so early that not many even of the early-rising farmers were astir.
In addition, the night having been so racked with the sounds of the guns,—now dying out, thank heaven!-and the noise of the ambulances coming in from the front and returning thereto, that most of the inhabitants of Clair were exhausted and slept late.
The American girl, well wrapped in a cloak and with an automobile veil wound about her hat and pulled down to her ears, walked on hurriedly, stopping now and then at a crossroad to make sure she was on the right track.
If Henriette Dupay could get her father’s car, and would drive Ruth to Lyse, the latter would be able to assure herself about Tom one way or another. She felt that she must know just how badly the young fellow was wounded!
To think! An arm torn off at the elbow—if it was really Tom who had been picked up with the note Ruth had received in his pocket. It was dreadful to think of.
At one point in her swift walk Ruth found herself sobbing hysterically. Yet she was not a girl who broke down easily. Usually she was selfcontrolled. Helen accused her sometimes of being even phlegmatic.
She took a new grip upon herself. Her nerves must not get the best of her! It might not be Tom Cameron at all who was wounded. There were other American officers mixed in with the French troops on this sector of the battle front—surely!
Yet, who else but Tom would have carried that letter written to “Dear Ruth Fielding”? The more the girl of the Red Mill thought of it the more confident she was that there could have been no mistake made. Tom had fallen wounded in the trenches and was now in the big hospital at Lyse, where she had worked for some weeks in the ranks of the Red Cross recruits.
Suddenly the girl was halted by a voice in the fog. A shrill exclamation in a foreign tone—not French—sounded just ahead. It was a man’s voice, and a woman’s answered. The two seemed to be arguing; but to hear people talking in anything but French or English in this part of France was enough to astonish anybody.