At this dismal picture Lucy sighed. She knew how such confinement had tried Bob’s active spirit and overcome his power to resist sickness when it came. She was about to offer some words of feeble encouragement when a muffled step around the corner of the building made her hold her breath in terror. The next moment she dropped to the ground and crouched on the wet earth in the shadow of the wall. A German soldier came sauntering by, looking up at the barred windows from under his rubber hood. He seemed to have no particular duty here, for he walked along humming to himself, as though on his way to bed. Before he passed the window beneath which Lucy crouched trembling, another figure came up behind him, splashing with heavy boots through the muddy pools.
“Is that you, Franz?” asked a guttural German voice.
“Yes,” responded the man in front, stopping to wait. “You off guard, too?”
“For three hours—not time enough to sleep,” grumbled the first speaker. “Why don’t they send enough men to garrison the place, if these empty streets must be watched like treasure-chests?”
“Because the front line needs more watching still,” said the first man, pausing to cover his rifle carefully with his rubber cape. “Those American devil-dogs are getting nasty. You know the little hill with the old Schloss on it? There’s our weak point, if you ask me. How could we hold the pond and swamp below when they won’t spare us artillery for the hill? I’ve been on guard there to-night, and I tell you we couldn’t. I know that much without wearing shoulder straps.”
“You seem to know a lot,” remarked the other man, still bad-humoredly. “Suppose you tell me where we are to get supper to-night.”
They passed on out of hearing, and Lucy, breathing fast with terror, sprang up from the ground. “Good-bye!” she whispered to the darkness of the window, and fled swiftly but with infinite caution through the mud and water of the road, toward the place where Elizabeth waited.
The talk she had just heard meant little at first, when her mind was filled with the wild thought of flight. But the gruff words, spoken in that language she had learned to hate, stuck in her memory as vividly as did the two disconsolate figures standing in the rain before her hiding-place.