“They came down on that biggest hay-field—the one right outside the town,” Lucy heard her saying. “Just two of them. One of the airplanes had a badly cut wing. I stopped to see them as I was coming back from the farmhouse with the orderly, after getting old Mère Breton’s eggs and milk.”
“Who were the aviators? Do you know their names?” interrupted Lucy, forgetting everything but her eagerness.
“Yes,” said the nurse, turning toward her with a pleasant nod and a look of curiosity on her own part at sight of the little stranger. “One of them is Captain Jourdin of the French Flying Corps. The other is an American—Lieutenant Gordon.”
Lucy’s heart gave such a bound she could hardly gasp out to Miss Pearse the wonderful truth.
“Your brother, Lucy?” the nurse exclaimed. “Are you sure? Of course it must be!”
“Oh, I’m sure! There’s not another Gordon in the Aviation Corps. How can I get to him? Who will take me?” cried Lucy, each moment’s delay beyond words unbearable.
“I’ll go with you myself—I can get off for an hour. We’ll have to run all the way,” said Miss Pearse in one hasty breath, Lucy’s wild eagerness awaking instant sympathy in her kind heart. “Wait here until I get permission.”
She was off as she spoke, leaving Lucy standing at the doorway to the garden trying to calm her whirling thoughts and to realize the truth of the happy chance that had come to her. So it had really been Bob all the time whom she had watched with such desperate hope and fear as he fought for his life in the clouds above her! At that moment it seemed days and days since she had risen from troubled dreams to the thunder of the guns that morning.
Miss Pearse came up behind her saying, “All right—come on!”
Together they ran through the garden and out into the street. It was a mile to the big level meadow just east of Château-Plessis, through streets heaped with fallen stones and rubbish, the houses scarred and battered by flying shrapnel, and here and there collapsed in utter ruin.