Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/209

 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 say-