Nello put the tambourine-player into her hands.  “Here is a doll I found in the snow, Alois.  Take it,” he whispered,—­“take it, and God bless thee, dear!”

He slid down from the shed-roof before she had time to thank him, and ran off through the darkness.

That night there was a fire at the mill.  Out-buildings and much corn were destroyed, although the mill itself and the dwelling-house were unharmed.  All the village was out in terror, and engines came tearing through the snow from Antwerp.  The miller was insured, and would lose nothing:  nevertheless, he was in furious wrath, and declared aloud that the fire was due to no accident, but to some foul intent.

Nello, awakened from his sleep, ran to help with the rest:  Baas Cogez thrust him angrily aside.  “Thou wert loitering here after dark,” he said roughly.  “I believe, on my soul, that thou dost know more of the fire than any one.”

Nello heard him in silence, stupefied, not supposing that any one could say such things except in jest, and not comprehending how any one could pass a jest at such a time.

Nevertheless, the miller said the brutal thing openly to many of his neighbors in the day that followed; and though no serious charge was ever preferred against the lad, it got bruited about that Nello had been seen in the mill-yard after dark on some unspoken errand, and that he bore Baas Cogez a grudge for forbidding his intercourse with little Alois; and so the hamlet, which followed the sayings of its richest landowner servilely, and whose families all hoped to secure the riches of Alois in some future time for their sons, took the hint to give grave looks and cold words to old Jehan Daas’s grandson.  No one said anything to him openly, but all the village agreed together to humor the miller’s prejudice, and at the cottages and farms where Nello and Patrasche called every morning for the milk for Antwerp, downcast glances and brief phrases replaced to them the broad smiles and cheerful greetings to which they had been always used.  No one really credited the miller’s absurd suspicions, nor the outrageous accusations born of them, but the people were all very poor and very ignorant, and the one rich man of the place had pronounced against him.  Nello, in his innocence and his friendlessness, had no strength to stem the popular tide.

“Thou art very cruel to the lad,” the miller’s wife dared to say, weeping, to her lord.  “Sure he is an innocent lad and a faithful, and would never dream of any such wickedness, however sore his heart might be.”

But Baas Cogez being an obstinate man, having once said a thing, held to it doggedly, though in his innermost soul he knew well the injustice that he was committing.

Meanwhile, Nello endured the injury done against him with a certain proud patience that disdained to complain; he only gave way a little when he was quite alone with old Patrasche.  Besides, he thought, “If it should win!  They will be sorry then, perhaps.”