Even as she thought this, the girl on the cot next to her own half rose to whisper:

“We’re Mrs. Hobby’s horses now.”

“That’s the girl called Betty,” Norma thought as she barely suppressed a disturbing laugh.

“Shish,” she managed to whisper. Then all was silent where, row on row, fifty girls were sleeping. Fifty! And Norma had spoken to barely half a dozen of them! It was all very strange.

Strange and exciting. Yes, it had surely been all that. They had all been jumpy, nervous as colts, on the train from Chicago. If they were walking down the aisle and the train tipped, they had laughed loudly. They had been high-pitched, nervous laughs. And why not? Had they not launched themselves on a new and striking adventure?

As Norma recalled all this she suddenly started, then rose silently on one shoulder. She had caught a flash of light where no light was supposed to be.

“A flash of light,” she whispered silently. At the same instant she caught the gleam of light once more. This time she located it—at the head of the cot by the nearest window.

“Rosa Rosetti!” she thought, with a start. She did not know the girl, barely recalled her name. She had a beaming smile, yet beyond doubt was foreign-born.

“What would you do if you suspected that someone was a spy?” That question had, not twenty-four hours before, been put to her by a very important person. She had answered as best she could. Had her answer been the correct one? Her reply had been:

“Nothing. At least, not at once.”

Now she settled back in her place. The flash of light from the head of Rosa Rosetti’s cot did not shine again. Nor did Norma Kent fall asleep at once.

“A flash of light in the night,” she was thinking. “How very unimportant!”

And yet, as her thoughts drifted back to her childhood days not so long ago—she was barely twenty-one now and just out of college—she recalled a story told by her father, a World War veteran. The story dealt with a stranger in an American uniform who, claiming to be lost from his outfit, had found refuge in their billet for the night.

“That night,” her father had said, “flashes of light were noticed at the window of our attic lodging. And that night, 

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