“Yes; but technically you see, Agnes, I’m with my own forces.”
He said “my own” with a tone of distinction which surprised himself. His own forces, except for a few comrade pilots, and for those engineers who had grabbed rifles, and got into this battle, and except for those girls—those “awfully good” girls of Picardy—still were only in training in France or holding down quiet sectors in Lorraine. But Gerry had been in one of those sectors which had not been so noted for its tranquillity after “his own” forces had arrived.
However, he was not thinking of those forces just then; he was recalling an American girl who had come to him across open ground in the sunlight and under machine-gun fire. For a moment he visualized her as she stumbled and rolled forward, when he thought she was hit; then he saw her close beside him with the sun on her glorious hair and her eyes all anxious for him. Words of hers came to him when Lady Agnes was speaking again her regret that the English could not have kept their own command.
“Oh, I don’t know how to say it!” that American girl’s words repeated themselves to Gerry; she was in a yellow dress now, with bare arms and neck, and quite warm and flushed with her intentness to explain to him something he could not understand at all. “But at first France was fighting as France and for France against Germany; and England, for England, was doing the same. And America couldn’t do that—I mean fight for America. She couldn’t join with allies who were fighting for themselves, or even for each other. The side of the allies had to become more than that before we could go in; and it is and we’re in!”
Gerry was understanding that better, now. This unification of the command, and the yielding of the British was their greatest earnest of that change which Cynthia Gail had felt before, and gloried in, and which Agnes Ertyle accepted but yet deplored.
More wounded came streaming back from the battle and Lady Agnes returned to duty immediately. “That Miss Gail, who was on the Ribot with us, was in Compiègne the other day,” Agnes told him when he was saying good-bye. “She’s doing marvels in sorting out refugees, I hear.”
Gerry had been wondering often during the last days about what might have happened to Cynthia; and he had inquired of several people. But he had not thought that Lady Agnes might know.
“She was working at a relief headquarters on Rue Solférino, near the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville.”
Gerry wandered into Compiègne, finding the Rue Solférino, which was the main street of the city, more crowded and congested than ever before. From the throng before the doors, Gerry quickly located the quarters near the Hôtel de Ville where Cynthia Gail had been working and, forcing a way in, he spied a yellow head bent over a little boy and he heard a gentle, sweet voice speaking, in newly learned French, interrogations about where the child last had seen his mother, whether he had aunt or uncle and so on. Gerry went farther in and made himself known; and when the girl looked up and saw him, an older American woman—Mrs. Mayhew—looked up, and she observed not only Gerry but the girl also.
“Hello,” Ruth said. It was a poor word to encompass all she was feeling at that moment, which was, first, joy and relief that he was safe; next, that he had come there to seek her. But the word did, as it many, many times had done before; and he used the same to encompass what he felt. “Have you had anything to eat tonight?” he added after his greeting. He suspected not.