ceased elsewhere.

For a quarter of an hour the bullets flew thick and fast from one side
of the valley to the other. Now and again someone who was so incautious
as to expose himself went down with a ball in his head or chest. There
were three men lying dead in the avenue. The rattling in the throat of
another man who had fallen prone upon his face was something horrible to
listen to, and no one thought to go and turn him on his back to ease
his dying agony. Jean, who happened to look around just at that moment,
beheld Henriette glide tranquilly down the steps, approach the wounded
man and turn him over, then slip a knapsack beneath his head by way of
pillow. He ran and seized her and forcibly brought her back behind the
tree where he and Maurice were posted.

"Do you wish to be killed?"

She appeared to be entirely unconscious of the danger to which she had
exposed herself.

"Why, no--but I am afraid to remain in that house, all alone. I would
rather be outside."

And so she stayed with them. They seated her on the ground at their
feet, against the trunk of the tree, and went on expending the few
cartridges that were left them, blazing away to right and left, with
such fury that they quite forgot their sensations of fear and fatigue.
They were utterly unconscious of what was going on around them,
acting mechanically, with but one end in view; even the instinct of
self-preservation had deserted them.

"Look, Maurice," suddenly said Henriette; "that dead soldier there
before us, does he not belong to the Prussian Guard?"

She had been eying attentively for the past minute or two one of the
dead bodies that the enemy had left behind them when they retreated, a
short, thick-set young man, with big mustaches, lying upon his side on
the gravel of the terrace.

The chin-strap had broken, releasing the spiked helmet, which had rolled
away a few steps. And it was indisputable that the body was attired in
the uniform of the Guard; the dark gray trousers, the blue tunic with
white facings, the greatcoat rolled and worn, belt-wise, across the
shoulder.

"It is the Guard uniform," she said; "I am quite certain of it. It is
exactly like the colored plate I have at home, and then the photograph
that Cousin Gunther sent us--" She stopped suddenly, and with her
unconcerned, fearless air, before anyone could make a motion to detain
her, walked up to the corpse, bent down and read the number of the
regiment. "Ah, the Forty-t