of their own, but nature was cruel, and for whatever reason they remained barren. It had to have been some measure of fate, then, that led the couple to stumble upon a young girl in the midst of a torrential spring downpour as they traversed a pass through the Vosges Mountains.

Ina was only six at the time, dressed only in sopping wet rags, hugging her knees and shivering beneath a small granite outcropping. Marie wouldn't have spotted her but for a scatter of broken-off rhododendron branches. The tiny girl had piled them in front of the overhang of rock before the rain had begun, and the clumps of leaves and hand-sized soft pink flowers had been nearly all washed away once the water started pouring over the ledge in streams.

Ina still remembered her first sight of the people...

Please subscribe to keep reading.