“Give Mother my dearest love,” she said huskily in his ear. “Tell her I’m safe, and please go now. Good-bye!”
“Good-bye, Elizabeth,” said Bob, having a hard time with his own unsteady voice. “Take care of her, won’t you? And whenever you cross that field keep a lookout for me.”
“Yes, Mr. Bob,” assented Elizabeth, patting the tall young aviator on the shoulder with a loving hand. “Tell your mother she should not too much worry over Miss Lucy. I do my best for her.”
“I know you will,” said Bob, with some relief in his heavy anxiety. “Good-bye, Captain.”
Another moment and he was swallowed up in the shadows, while Lucy and Elizabeth stood gazing after him with straining eyes, their ears on the alert for every sound, though nothing could be heard around them just then in the noise of the cannon.
Still silent and motionless they stood there after Bob had gone with eyes lifted now to the sky above the wood. Within a quarter of an hour the little Nieuport rose like a winged speck over the tree tops. Lucy clutched Elizabeth’s arm, her heart pounding intolerably. “There he is! There he is!” she whispered, her mind hovering between relief that Bob had got safely away from German territory and dread of what he had still to face. Another second and the little monoplane had disappeared in the blue, and Elizabeth was tugging at Lucy’s arm and saying earnestly in her ear:
“Come, Miss Lucy! We should go back quickly now!”
Lucy turned away from the wide starry spaces on which her eyes were still fixed, and, obedient to Elizabeth’s urging began to retrace her steps across the fields behind her old nurse’s cautious feet. She walked mechanically, her eyes on possible shell holes, but her mind far distant. Lucy’s moments of fear and weakness had one redeeming feature. They were usually followed by a great scorn of herself in which her courage and endurance rose to a high pitch. So it was with her now, after the despairing terror which had made her hold fast to Bob, and forget half she had to say to him at the moment of parting. At sight of him flying back through the night to make his perilous way among the swarming German planes above the trenches, all her courage returned to her. She could do nothing toward Bob’s safety, but while he was in danger she would do the one thing in her power which might be of some distant help to the Allies.
“Elizabeth,” she said, as together they made a difficult way through a tangle of bushes near Mère Breton’s cottage, “I’m going back by way of the Old Prison.”
“But why, Miss Lucy? For what?” Elizabeth demanded in amazement, stopping short to catch her breath.