Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/241

 upon the street and they had walked together; Ruth said also that she had seen her brother. Milicent evidently ascribed her agitation to a quarrel with Byrne.

Ruth lay awake most of that night. The morning paper which Milicent and she read contained no mention, amid the tremendous news from the front, of the attack upon an American officer in a ruined house; and no consequences threatened Ruth that morning. She planned for a while to try to trace Byrne and learn whether he had regained consciousness; then she abandoned that purpose. She was satisfied, from one of those instincts which baffle question, that Byrne lived; and it would be only a question of time before he must accuse her.

Yet she might have time enough to leave Paris and France—to get away into Switzerland and into Germany. For the fact that a German had for her attempted to strike her accuser dead was final proof that the Germans had not connected her with the betrayal of De Trevenac; they believed that she had been in Picardy all this time on account of orders given her by De Trevenac.

It was possible, of course, that the German who had struck for her and whom she had pursued, would now himself suspect her. Yet her flight after him might have seemed to him only her ruse to escape. What he had last said to her, she must receive as her orders from the Germans in Paris. "Away to Switzerland!"

That concurred with the sentence of instruction given upon that page which she had received with her passport that cold January morning in Chicago. . . . "You will report in person, via Switzerland; apply for passport to Lucerne."