“You’ve been hearing from me. I’m Cynthia Gail, I tell you. I’ve been Cynthia Gail since January.”
He caught another glimpse of her face; and his impetuousness to start to the Rue des Saints Pères collapsed, pitifully. “Where shall we go?” he asked.
Ruth gazed about, uncertainly; she had not attended to their direction; and now she found herself in a strange, narrow street of tiny shops and apartments, interrupted a half square ahead by a chasm of ruins and strewn débris, where one of those random shells from the German long-range gun, or a bomb dropped from a night-raiding Gotha recently had struck. The destruction had been done sufficiently long ago, however, for the curiosity of the neighborhood to have been already satisfied and for all treasures to have been removed. The ruin was fenced off, therefore, and was unguarded. Ruth gazed into the shell of the building and Byrne, glancing in also, saw that in the rear were apartments half wrecked and deserted, but which offered sanctuary from the street.
CHAPTER XIV
FULL CONFESSION
“No one will be likely to come in here,” Ruth said, and stepped into the house.
Byrne followed her without comment, quite indifferent to their surroundings. When Ruth spoke to him again about the house, he replied vacantly; his mind was not here, but with Cynthia Gail, where he had last seen her in Chicago that Sunday night in January when they had parted. What had thereafter happened to her was the first matter to him.
Ruth, exploring the ruin, came upon a room which seemed to have been put in some sort of order, so far as she could see from the dim light which came through the doorway.
“Give me a match,” she asked Byrne; he took a matchbox from his pocket and, striking a light, he held it while they peered about. There was a fixture protruding from the wall, but no light resulted when Ruth turned the switch. Byrne’s match went out; he struck several others before their search discovered a bit of a candle in an old sconce in a corner. Byrne lit it, and Ruth closed the door which led into what had been a hallway. She returned to Byrne, who had remained in the corner where the candle diffused its light. There was a built-in bench there beside an old fireplace, a couple of old chairs and a table.
“Let’s sit down,” Ruth said.
“You sit down,” Byrne bid. “I’ll—” he did not finish his sentence; but he remained standing, hands behind him, staring down at her as she seated herself upon the bench.