"I'm so glad," faltered Lucy, longing, as she shook hands, to ask more about Bob, and what chance Mr. Leslie might have of success.
The Frenchman gave a friendly salute to William, who returned it promptly with his red-mittened paw, and limped slowly off over the snow to meet the advancing officer.
"I wonder if he could have told me anything," Lucy asked herself, wishing she had got up courage to question him further while she had time. "He's had no end of adventures since the war began. Perhaps he's been in a German prison, too."
"Come on, Lucy, let's go. What are you standing there for?" demanded William, stamping his cold feet and looking impatiently at his sister, who seemed lost in watching the departing Frenchman.
"I wonder what he's been through since 1914," Lucy murmured; then, turning back to William and the sled, she picked up the rope, saying, "All right, come on. Suppose you walk until you get warm and then I'll pull you the rest of the way. Happy can do whichever he likes."
"He'd rather walk until I get on," said William, starting along. "Let's stop and look at the airplane first. It can't fly, you know."
All the way home Lucy was preoccupied, thinking of her hurried first-aid dressing, and of whether she had really helped the sprain, then forgetting that, to wish again that she had tried to learn something of Bob's probable whereabouts and chances of liberty.
"If only I may see him again, I'll ask him," she thought, but not very hopefully, for the foreign instructors remained principally on the aviation field, and the officers' children were seldom allowed there.
Lucy could hardly wait, when she got home, to tell her mother and Marian all about it, though she stopped in the middle of her story to look up sprains in her tattered first-aid manual, to see if she had forgotten anything that could have been carried out on the spot. Relieved about that she went on talking, and as she described the French aviator Mrs. Gordon said:
"That's the man Captain Brent speaks so much of. He can't say enough in his praise. He was telling your father the other night about some of his wonderful exploits."