"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.
The brave soldier had adopted the child he had saved, and it was to provide means for her support that he now taught German in Miss Prim's school.
You may be sure that after this the little Elsie and her adopted father had no firmer friend nor warmer admirer than Pickle, who through them had learned a lesson that she never forgot.