en then he believed in
Frightfulness; for that is what it amounted to when he changed Leteur to
Dundgardt.

But he could not very well change the old family name, even if he could
change the names of towns and villages in his stolen province, and old
Pierre Leteur and his wife and daughter lived in the old house under the
Prussian menace, and managed the vineyard and talked French on the sly.

On a certain fair evening old Pierre and his wife and daughter sat in
the arbor and chatted in the language which they loved. The old man had
lost an arm in the fighting when his beloved Alsace was lost to France
and he had come back here still young but crippled and broken-hearted,
to live under the Germans because this was the home of his people. He
had found the old house and the vineyard devastated.

After a while he married an Alsatian girl very much younger than
himself, and their son and daughter had grown up, German subjects it is
true, but hating their German masters and loving the old French Alsace
of which their father so often told them.

While Florette was still a mere child she committed the heinous crime of
singing the _Marseillaise_. The watchful Prussian authorities learned of
this and a couple of Prussian soldiers came after her, for she must
answer to the Kaiser for this terrible act of sedition.

Her brother Armand, then a boy of sixteen, had shouted "_Vive la
France!_" in the very faces of the grim soldiers and had struck one of
them with all his young strength.

In that blow spoke gallant, indomitable France!

For this act Armand might have been shot, but, being young and agile and
the German soldiers being fat and clumsy, he effected a flank move and
disappeared before they could lay hands on him and it was many a long
day before ever his parents heard from him again.

At last there came a letter from far-off America, telling of his flight
across the mountains into France and of his working his passage to the
United States. How this letter got through the Prussian censorship
against all French Alsatians, it would be hard to say. But it was the
first and last word from him that had ever reached the blighted home.

After a while the storm cloud of the great war burst and then the
prospect of hearing from Armand became more hopeless as the British navy
threw its mighty arm across the ocean highway. And old Pierre, because
he was a French veteran, was watched more suspiciously than ever.

Florette was