Ruth of the U. S. A.

by Edwin Balmer

Ruth breathed her thankfulness that Byrne was not dead; and she withdrew. Since Byrne had been taken away, she could do nothing for him; and she would simply destroy herself by giving herself up to the authorities. If Byrne lived and regained consciousness, undoubtedly he would inform against her.

But though she would not give herself up, certainly she would not try to escape if Byrne accused her; she would return to her room and go about her work while she awaited consequences.

None followed her that night. She admitted to Milicent, when questioned, that she had met Lieutenant Byrne upon the street and they had walked together; Ruth said also that she had seen her brother. Milicent evidently ascribed her agitation to a quarrel with Byrne.

Ruth lay awake most of that night. The morning paper which Milicent and she read contained no mention, amid the tremendous news from the front, of the attack upon an American officer in a ruined house; and no consequences threatened Ruth that morning. She planned for a while to try to trace Byrne and learn whether he had regained consciousness; then she abandoned that purpose. She was satisfied, from one of those instincts which baffle question, that Byrne lived; and it would be only a question of time before he must accuse her.

Yet she might have time enough to leave Paris and France—to get away into Switzerland and into Germany. For the fact that a German had for her attempted to strike her accuser dead was final proof that the Germans had not connected her with the betrayal of De Trevenac; they believed that she had been in Picardy all this time on account of orders given her by De Trevenac.

It was possible, of course, that the German who had struck for her and whom she had pursued, would now himself suspect her. Yet her flight after him might have seemed to him only her ruse to escape. What he had last said to her, she must receive as her orders from the Germans in Paris. “Away to Switzerland!”

That concurred with the sentence of instruction given upon that page which she had received with her passport that cold January morning in Chicago.... “You will report in person, via Switzerland; apply for passport to Lucerne.”

At this moment when, for the cause of her country and its allies, she had determined that she must make the attempt to go on to Germany, the Germans were ready to have her. And that was easy to understand; she had spent weeks going about freely behind the newly formed English and French lines which bagged back about the immense salient which the Germans had thrust toward Amiens; she was supposed, as a German, to have ready report about the strength of those lines as seen from the rear, of the strength of the support, the morale of soldiers and civilians and the thousand other details which the enemy desired to know.

So Ruth went early that morning to the United States Consul General with her passport which long ago had been substituted for that ruined passport of Cynthia Gail’s; and she offered it for visé, asking permission to leave Paris and France for a visit to the neutral country of Switzerland, and, more particularly, to Lucerne. She stated that the object of her journey was rest and recuperation; she knew that, not infrequently in the recent months, American girls who had been working near the war zones had been permitted vacations in Switzerland; but she found that times were different now. She encountered no expressed suspicion and no discourtesy; she simply was informed that in the present crisis it was impossible to act immediately upon such requests. Her application would be filed and passed upon in due time; and a clerk questioned Ruth concerning the war service which she had rendered which was supposed to have so exhausted her that she desired rest in Switzerland.

Ruth, hot with shame, perforce related what she had been through in the retreat. She was quite aware when she went away and returned to her work that her application for permission to go to Switzerland would be the most damning evidence against her, when Byrne should bring his accusation; and now, having made application, she could do nothing but wait where she was. However, she heard nothing from Byrne or from the authorities upon that day nor upon the succeeding days of the week during which she worked, as she had when she first came to Paris, in the offices of the relief society; upon almost every afternoon she visited Charles Gail who was slowly sinking.