Sally turned to Pickle. "How could you do it?" she whispered to her companion, whose face, flushed with the effort to restrain her mirth, was alarmingly red.
"What do you mean?" returned Pickle, with an unconscious air.
The next minute Miss Meek again entered, this time with an inkstand for the teacher's desk. In placing it she evidently saw the bundle of hair-pins, for she looked indignantly around the class before leaving the room, while Herr Müller once more flushed a rosy red.
"She'll tell that to Miss Prim, Pickle--see if she don't," whispered Sally, anxiously, to her friend.
"Do you think so?" queried Pickle, hastily; then, with marked indifference, "Yes, I suppose she will. I wonder if she'll find out who did it?"
"Oh, you needn't try to deceive me; as if I didn't know who did it!" returned the other.
"Do you?" was the only reply she got to her attempt at confidence.
This provoked Sally. "Yes, I do; and Miss Prim'll find out, too, without much telling--you can be sure of that."
Miss Prim did find out, but not without any telling. Pickle wisely determined to forestall all investigations. She went privately to the grieved Miss Prim, and announced herself as the culprit.
Although Miss Prim punished Pickle at the time for her disrespect, the kind-hearted girl--for she was kind-hearted in spite of her love of mischief--was much more severely punished by her own conscience when, a few days later, she learned why Herr Müller allowed his curly locks to grow down over his shoulders.
A brave young soldier in the German army, he had, during the siege of Metz, left the shelter of the trenches, and in the face of almost certain death rushed across the open ground where shot, shell, and bullets fell thick as hail, to snatch up and bring safely back in his strong arms a little child. It was a blue-eyed four-year-old girl who, terror-stricken and bewildered by the death of her parents and the awful firing, had wandered from one of the crumbling houses outside the walls of the city. When the soldiers in the trenches first saw her she was standing irresolute but unharmed amid the storm of flying death that swept across the plain.
Just as he reached the trenches with his precious burden the young soldier was hurled to the ground badly wounded, and apparently dead. A fragment of a bursting shell had struck him on the back of the neck. Although he lived and finally recovered, a terrible and unsightly scar remained, and was only hidden from sight by the thick curls that Pickle had so despised.