She seemed to be hesitating. Then blowing out her candle and with difficulty opening one of the heavy shutters, she climbed out upon a small balcony. The balcony, which was only a few feet in width, commanded an unusual view of the surrounding country.
As there were no large objects to obstruct the vision, one could see an extraordinary distance in the clear and brilliant moonlight. Not a single tree of any size guarded the old French château, although one might reasonably have expected to find it surrounded by a forest of a century’s growth.
Only a few years before, the trees on this French estate had been famous throughout the countryside. An avenue of oaks bordering either side the road to the house had been half a mile in length and of great age and beauty. Strangers in the neighborhood were driven through the grounds of the château, chiefly that they might admire its extraordinary old trees.
Tonight, looking out from the little balcony down this selfsame avenue, one could see only a few gnarled trunks of the once famous trees, still standing like sentinels faithful at their posts till death.
When, soon after the outbreak of the European war the Germans swept across the Marne, the Château Yvonne and its grounds had been made an object of their special mania for destruction. Such trees as had not been destroyed by bursting shells and poisonous gases they had deliberately set afire.
Yet at present, Mrs. Burton, as she stood on the little balcony and looked out over the country, was grateful for their loss. She was thus able to observe so much more of the surrounding landscape. There was no human being in sight.
For the past four days she and five of the Camp Fire girls had been in hiding in the Château Yvonne, and within these four days the face of the world seemed to have changed.
Already it has grown difficult for some of us to recall the last week in March in the year 1918, when the Germans again appeared to have a chance of victory and the Allied lines were seen to waver and then recede from northern to southern France.
It was within this fateful week, with the channel ports and Paris again threatened, that the Camp Fire guardian and her group of American girls, had been vainly awaiting at the Château Yvonne the arrival of Miss Patricia Lord, Vera Lagerloff and Sally Ashton, in order that they might continue their retreat to Paris.
As Mrs. Burton now gazed out over the landscape, shining serenely in the clear beauty of the moonlight, she was interested in only two problems. What had become of Miss Patricia and her companions and how far away from the Château Yvonne at this hour was the German army?