Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/102

 "Not a thing. Let's get dressed!"

Gongs were beating throughout the ship; and the guns on deck were going, "Twumm! twumm! twumm!" Ruth could hear, in the intervals, the voices of stewards calling to passengers in the companionways between the cabins. A tremendous shock, stifling and deafening, hurled Ruth against the bunk; hurled Milicent upon her. They clung together, coughing and gasping for breath.

"Hit us!" Ruth said; she might have shouted; she might have whispered; she did not know which.

"That's just powder fumes; not gas," Milicent made herself understood.

"No; not nauge de gaz," Ruth agreed. They were hearing each other quite normally; and they laughed at each other—at the French lesson phrase, rather. They had learned the phrases together, drilled each other and taken the lessons so seriously; and the lessons seemed so silly now.

"They must have hurt someone," Ruth said. For the first time she consciously thought of Gerry Hull; probably subconsciously she had been thinking of him all the time. "He wasn't hit," she was saying to herself confidently now. "That shell struck us forward; his cabin's aft and on the other side; so he couldn't have been hurt—unless he'd come to this side to get Lady Agnes."

Another shell exploded in the ship-aft somewhere and lower. It didn't knock Ruth down or stifle her with fumes as the other had. Someone was beating at her door and she opened it—Milicent and she had got into their clothes. Ruth saw Hubert Lennon in the passage.