would be burned.

"Not one of the villagers was bold enough to try to warn the French
garrison of the peril that awaited them, for it was plain that the
Germans were planning to lay in wait for the Frenchmen when they came
to the village on the following morning.

"Soon German soldiers began entering the houses, one soldier to each
house, in which he took his station, cowering the occupants by
terrible threats.

"Little Mathilde, when she heard the soldier assigned to their home
bang on the door with the butt of his rifle, fled to the kitchen,
where she stood listening and watching. She nearly cried out when the
soldier thrust the bayonet of his rifle at her father, and all the
resentment of her race at such injustice rose up within her.

"'I shall save them,' she breathed.

"Mathilde slipped out through the kitchen door into the walled garden,
and, climbing the wall, peered over. She could see German horsemen and
German infantrymen everywhere, the moonlight flashing on their helmets
and rifles as they moved rapidly about. How she should be able to get
over the wall without discovery she did not know. A heavy black cloud
at this moment drifted across the sky, hiding the face of the moon for
a few moments, and when the cloud had passed Mathilde was no longer on
the garden wall. She lay prone on the ground in a field on the
opposite side of the wall. Horsemen were all about her. Now and then a
horse narrowly missed stepping on her, and those Uhlans must have
wondered that night why their horses were so skittish.