The horror and despair that seized upon the aviator shook Captain Dexter.
"By Hannah, boy! don't take on so," he, alone with Frank in his quarters, urged. "I didn't suspect that there was so much betwixt you and the girl."
"There isn't," Sanderson declared. "There's nothing between us. But I love her, Captain Dexter," and the confession was wrung from the young man in his agony of spirit. "It's my misfortune, too, to be tangled up in a way that ought to keep me from asking her even to think of me."
"Do tell!" murmured Captain Dexter anxiously. "Mixed up with another woman, are you? By Hannah! I wouldn't have thought it."
Frank did not hear this. His mind was fixed upon Belinda and her peril.
"We must do something," he said, recovering in a measure his calmness. "Her position as a Red Cross nurse should assist her. There must be some way of communicating with her—some means of inquiry."
"By Hannah! I'm not goin' back to that aunt of hers without knowin' what's become of the girl. Let me tell you, that Mam'selle Roberta isn't the woman for a man to try to bamfoozle. She's as sharp as can be. By Hannah! I wouldn't darest go back to Paris without takin' Belinda with me or knowin' that she was all right and safe."
Frank Sanderson's anxiety, based on something deeper than this, led him to "raise heaven and earth," as Captain Dexter suggested, to obtain news of the missing nurse. Although communication, even official communication, between the opposing armies is more infrequent in this war than in any other modern struggle, through influence at the army corps headquarters and because of his record and that he was an American, rules were set aside and a direct request for information regarding Belinda was made to the German staff commander.
Several days elapsed before the reply reached Sanderson and Captain Dexter, and this reply was both discouraging and terrifying to the two Americans. No nurse or other person by the name of Melnotte had been found at the abandoned French hospital station when it was taken over for the German army. Nor was there any record of a person by that name found within the district.
"Something has happened to her—something serious," the young aviator said. "I am sorry she ever came over here. She had no right to risk her life on these battlefields."