He handed the letter to her, and Ruth withdrew nearer a lamp to read it. They were still quite alone in the corner of the canteen, and as Ruth read the letter written by the father of the girl whose part she had played, tears of gratitude and joy blinded her—gratitude not alone to the noble-hearted man and woman in Decatur, but quite as much to the friend who had written of her to them with such understanding as to make possible this letter.
She came back to him with tears running down her cheeks and she seized his hand again. “Oh, Hubert, thank you; thank you! I don’t think anything ever made me so happy in all my life.”
“You know Byrne’s dead, do you?”
“No! Is he? He died from that——”
“Not from that, Miss Alden. He completely recovered. He was killed cleanly leading his platoon in the fighting on the Vesle. He had written Cynthia’s people about you forgiving you, you see.”
Hubert turned to the door and opened it and gazed out through the dark about the hills and woods where that night the hundreds of thousands of Americans of the First Army lay. “Funny about us being back here, isn’t it?” he said, with the reflective philosophy which he was likely to employ when dismissing one subject. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot these last days, seeing our fellows everywhere—so awful many of them. Everyone of ’em—or their fathers—came from this side first of all because they didn’t like the way things were going in Europe, and they wanted to get away from it. But they couldn’t get away from it by just leaving it. They had to come back after all to settle the trouble. That’s an interesting idea, when you think of it, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Ruth. “Hubert——”
“How does Gerry feel about being an American now?”
“I’ve not talked with Gerry for more than three months.”
“Being an American,” Hubert mused, “being an American is some privilege these days—even if you only drive an ambulance. To be Gerry Hull now!” He gazed at Ruth, who looked away, but who could not stop color suffusing her face under his challenge. He glanced about the room and observed that they were quite alone.