“Yes; we had better walk, perhaps. There are many more places of great interest. I shall show them to you.”
He pointed Ruth ahead of him down a narrow way; and when she proceeded obediently, he followed.
She welcomed the few moments offered for consideration. So George Byrne had not died! That was a weight from her heart; and Wessels had only fragmentary facts about her, however he had received them. He knew that she had had another “flame,” an American infantry lieutenant; but Wessels had not known his name.
“You were lucky to get here,” Wessels offered, coming up beside her when the way widened. Their direction was farther out from the city and they continued to be quite alone. “But it cooks your chance to go back.”
“To France, you mean?”
“Where else?”
She had thought of the possibility of being dispatched from Switzerland not into Germany, but back to France. If someone was to meet her at Lucerne who could take complete report upon the matters which she had been supposed to observe, the logical action would be to return her to work again behind the allied lines. Her original instructions, received in Chicago, had only implied—they had not directly stated—that she was to go on into Germany; but she had clung to the belief that she would go on. And now the failure of Mecklen to fully do his work with Byrne had settled that doubt for Ruth; for with Byrne alive and likely at any day to “open his mouth,” obviously the Germans would not order her into the hands of the French.
“We may use you in Russia or Greece; but not France for the present, or even Italy,” Wessels said. “But first you can visit home, if you like.”
He meant the Fatherland, home of the girl whom he believed Ruth to be; and Ruth knew that she had come to the crisis. If the fragmentary facts which had been forwarded to this man comprised any account of the girl whom the Germans in Chicago had meant to locate and whom they had failed to find when they entrusted their mission to Ruth, she was stopped now. If not....
“I’d like to look in at the old home,” Ruth said.