Knowing what she did from Philip Dawson’s confidence, so much and at the same time so little, Nona naturally endured a miserable day. She was fearful that Barbara Thornton would have to face even graver charges. For after her interview Eugenia had gone directly to her husband and, so far as Nona knew, had spoken to no one of what she had learned from the interview.
Nona was also puzzled. For Lieutenant Kelley to be one of the officers who came to the hospital did not suggest his guilt. Yet, unless he and Barbara were in some way involved, why should Madame Castaigne be told a purely military secret?
That night, after Captain Castaigne had fallen asleep, happily for Nona, Eugenia chose her as her solitary confidant.
Later, the same information was discussed by every human being inside the American hospital. But by what method the news was disseminated no one could have told. Certainty neither Nona Davis nor Madame Castaigne were responsible.
The truth was that Agatha Burton, who had been working as a Red Cross nurse for nearly two years, was a German spy. She had gone into the Red Cross training with but this one idea and plan in mind. The months she had devoted to nursing in Italy, keeping faith and gaining an excellent record as a nurse were to render her reputation above suspicion when the hour of the United States’ entrance into the war and the sending of American soldiers to France arrived.
Moreover, Agatha Burton was an American. There was no reason why the authorities who had investigated her history, in the effort to discover whether or not she would be an acceptable Red Cross nurse in the Allied countries, should have suspected her disloyalty.
Yet the drama and the disloyalty went deeper than Agatha Burton’s share.
Three years before, at the outbreak of the war, Charles Anderson had enlisted as a private in the United States army. His people were German-Americans, but for this and for other causes, he had expressed his desire to prove his devotion to the United States.
There are many loyal German-Americans in our country and the sympathy of the American people has, from the beginning of the present war, gone out to them. So no one dreamed that Charles Anderson wore the uniform of the United States army merely as a mask for treachery. Yet Germany has been responsible for strange, distorted ideas of right and justice in her war. At one time the spy, after his death at least, enjoyed fame in his own country, the land for which he often suffered both dishonor and death. But Germany has rendered dishonor more dishonorable.
The German spy is the man or woman who, after eating your bread, living under your roof, sharing all that your generosity has to give, in the end betrays you.