Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/126

 "Oh, I'll not stay at the Mayhews' or on Avenue Kléber! I'm to find a room with Milicent Wetherell."

"So you'll carry out your Latin Quarter plan! That's better! But you'll leave the address, anyway, at the Mayhews'?"

"Yes," Ruth promised.

She took the opportunity to ask him many practical, matter-of-fact items which she needed to know—particularly about the examinations to be made upon arrival in France.

"My passport's almost ruined, you see," she explained to him.

"Why? What's happened?"

Ruth colored. "I always carried it with me; so it got soaked in the sea the other day."

Color came to his face too; that had happened when she went into the water to get him, of course. She would not have reminded him of it but that she knew she well might need help no less influential than his to pass the gateway to France.

"Of course," he said. "How's it spoiled?"

"My picture on it, mostly."

"Oh; that'll be all right! You'll just have to have another picture taken in France and have them paste it on. I'll tell 'em about it and see you through, of course."

Accordingly Ruth went to her cabin and, after bolting the door against even Milicent Wetherell, she got out her passport which really had been wet by the sea but not soaked so badly that the picture was useless. Indeed, the picture was still plain enough so that a French intelligence officer might make out that it was not Ruth. So she