“Ah! I salute you, gnädiges Fräulein, and your comrades for the wonderful work you have done. But the importance of that is past, Fräulein Brun! Since then where have you been?”
“My duty, as I interpreted it, was to retreat with the British; so I was swept back with them to Compiègne. Since then, as I explained to Herr Hauptmann, passport difficulties detained me in Paris.”
“Then all from Reims to Soissons is in Herr Hauptmann’s ordered mind! It is, as all the most essential would be, in his ‘good memory’! And, by the latest, today the report was to start to great headquarters!”
The secretary jerked about from Ruth and hurried back and forth across the room, head down and clapping his hands loudly together in his despair; and Ruth, watching him, sat stark. The importance of the Picardy front was past, he had said—that front where, in the tremendous assaults of March, the Germans had thrust their great salient between Amiens and Paris and where all the allies were working, day and night, strengthening their lines against a new attack! The Flanders front, where still the German armies were hurling themselves toward the channel? Adler did not even mention that. The “most essential” was the front from Reims to Soissons, all quiet now and one which—so far as Ruth knew—the allies expected to remain quiet and where they yet were unprepared for a great attack.
But there the next tremendous assault must be coming; and it was so near that, by the latest, today report of conditions upon that front was to start to great headquarters! Well, whatever was written about that front Ruth had now in the papers folded tight against her body and what von Forstner had entrusted to his ordered mind was lost forever! Keenly she watched Adler while, still striking his hands together in his helplessness, he strode swiftly up and down.
He spun about to her suddenly, and for an instant Ruth believed he was about to challenge her. But the secretary could not yet reach suspicion of the comrade of his Herr Hauptmann and for whom Hauptmann von Forstner had instructed rooms to be made ready beside his own and who herself had completed the journey to Lauengratz alone and of her own will and bearing Herr Hauptmann’s papers.
“You removed these yourself from Herr Hauptmann’s body?”
“No; Dittman procured them for me. I was somewhat injured myself, you see,” she explained her neglect. “And a little faint, at first.”
“Of course; of course! But Dittman is a thick skull! He might not have suspected where Herr Hauptmann might have concealed the most important memoranda!” Adler livened with hope. “And there were Russians, I understand, who first found you and dragged out Herr Hauptmann. They are mere brutes, incapable of understanding anything. Nevertheless they may have meddled. I shall send and see and at once myself examine the body of Herr Hauptmann!”
He turned about and gazed at his papers; he swept them together and into a drawer. The stencils, by which he had read the ciphers, went with them. “You will remain here, gnädiges Fräulein,” he half commanded, half requested, and he hastened from the room.