Ruth lay that night in a beautiful bed of gold and blue—the most grateful, the most excited, the most humble and insignificant-feeling girl in all France. When she had started out upon this adventure in America she had seemed to herself to be seizing an opportunity ordained for her by fate and entrusted to her as the instrument for a great deed; now the fact that she was here, and had come with an idea that she could greatly do, seemed the most assuming conceit in the world.
The next morning when she went out upon the avenues in the uniform, which now she was to wear constantly, the pettiness of her part reimpressed itself with every square she passed as she witnessed the throngs of soldiers—of a dozen races, of innumerable nations—gathered for the war. She went with Hubert to the American consulate, where she applied for a new passport to replace the ruined one; then, proceeding alone to the office where Cynthia Gail was to report, she accepted gladly the simple, routine duties assigned her.
That same day she and Milicent found a room in a pension upon the Rue des Saints Pères, where Hubert and Mrs. Mayhew called upon her the next evening. But if Gerry Hull had inquired for her at the Mayhew’s, his inquiry resulted in no visit to the Rue des Saints Pères. Lieutenant Gerry Hull was transferred—so Ruth read in a Matin of the next week—to the American forces and was flying now under his own flag. And with his return to duty it seemed that he must have lost concern for a girl satisfied to do half-clerical, half-charity relief work among refugees in Paris.
Of course Ruth did not think of herself as merely doing such work; she considered herself as waiting for further instructions from the Germans.
The orders which she had received from the spy in Chicago had directed her to take up this work of Cynthia Gail’s; and only by following these orders could she hope to carry out her plan.
She found far more talk of German agents, and far more certainty of their activities, in Paris than she had heard about in Chicago. The difference was that while in Chicago the presence and the activities of German spies was extraordinary, here it was the everpresent and accepted thing—like the arrival of trains of wounded from the front and air raids upon clear nights. She learned that the Germans undertook no important enterprise without information from their agents in France; she learned that, as in America, these agents were constantly being taken. It was plain to her, therefore, that they could scarcely have any rigid organization or any routine method of reports or intercommunication. They must operate by creating or seizing sudden opportunities.
During the noon hour upon a day in the middle of February, Ruth left the relief rooms, where she had been working, to wander in the winter sunlight by Notre Dame, where bells were ringing for some special mass. She went in and stood in the nave, listening to the chants, when she observed a gentleman of about fifty, evidently a Parisian, go to a pew beyond her and kneel down. She noticed him because she had seen him at least twice before when she was coming out of her office, and he had observed her with keener glance than gentlemen of his apparent station were accustomed to bestow.
She went from the cathedral after a few minutes and wandered up the Rue St. Jacques toward the Sorbonne, when the same man suddenly appeared about a corner and—a rather gusty wind was blowing—his hat left his head and blew toward Ruth. She stooped quickly and picked it up.
He thanked her effusively in French and, observing that she was an American in uniform, he extended compliments upon the participation of America, which made it impossible for Ruth to go on at once. Suddenly, and without change in his tone, he inquired her name.
“Cynthia Gail,” she gave it, without thinking anything in particular.