“You have friends in France?”
“Only acquaintances such as one makes traveling; no one whom I could now place. I’ve letters to Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Mayhew, of Avenue Kléber. I did not know them when I was in France before.”
The examiner made notations on his card.
“Report at your first opportunity, if you please, to your consul general at Paris and obtain a passport in place of this!” He was writing upon her passport now and handing it back to her! Whatever reservation of judgment he had made in regard to her; whatever orders he might give to watch her pending verification of her facts, he was passing her on and permitting her to go with the others to take the afternoon train to Paris!
She saw to customs and let Hubert order the transfer of her luggage; then she was free upon the streets of her first foreign city. Not for long; because the train for Paris left soon. But Hubert hired a queer old cab, driven by a white-haired, Gallicly garrulous man, who quickly understood that they were less interested in the wide magnificence of the modern city than in the labyrinths of the old town with its white, huddled houses facing quaint, gayly painted shops about irregular squares, and looming at one another over the narrowest of mediaeval streets.
They halted the cab and walked down the delightful defiles. Ruth had to remember, in her raptures, that she was supposed to have been in France before; but there were moments when Hubert left her—he understood that she wanted to experience some of this alone—when the incredible wonder that she was abroad overwhelmed her. She had cabled, of course, to Cynthia Gail’s parents in Decatur; but she wanted to cable her own mother to tell her where she was, and to buy the pretty, picturesque postal cards, and send them to her sisters; she wanted to write some of the wonder to all her friends; she would have included even a card to Sam Hilton. But all that was impossible.
Then the sight of French soldiers on the narrow streets and the many, many French women in mourning—mothers and widows—returned her to the grim, terrible business which had brought her here. She rejoined Hubert where he had been waiting for her at the end of a twisty, shadowy little street; he had bought a French newspaper; and when she came beside him, he glanced up at her gravely.
“They’ve sunk a transport with American troops, Cynthia,” he said.
“Where? How many of our soldiers—?” she cried.
“The Tuscania to the north of Ireland; torpedoed when we were at sea. Two or three hundred of our men are missing; they don’t know exactly how many yet.”