The miller stood and looked at the portrait with tears in his eyes—­it was so strangely like, and he loved his only child closely and well.  Then he roughly chid the little girl for idling there while her mother needed her within, and sent her indoors crying and afraid; then, turning, he snatched the wood from Nello’s hands.  “Dost do much of such folly?” he asked, but there was a tremble in his voice.

Nello coloured and hung his head.  “I draw everything I see,” he murmured.

The miller was silent; then he stretched his hand out with a franc in it.  “It is folly, as I say, and evil waste of time; nevertheless, it is like Alois, and will please the house-mother.  Take this silver bit for it and leave it for me.”

The colour died out of the face of the young Ardennois; he lifted his head and put his hands behind his back.  “Keep your money and the portrait both, Baas Cogez,” he said, simply.  “You have been often good to me.”  Then he called Patrasche to him, and walked away across the fields.

“I could have seen them with that franc,” he murmured to Patrasche, “but I could not sell her picture—­not even for them.”

Baas Cogez went into his mill-house sore troubled in his mind.  “That lad must not be so much with Alois,” he said to his wife that night.  “Trouble may come of it hereafter; he is fifteen now, and she is twelve; and the boy is comely of face and form.”

“And he is a good lad and a loyal,” said the housewife, feasting her eyes on the piece of pine wood where it was throned above the chimney with a cuckoo clock in oak and a Calvary in wax.

“Yea, I do not gainsay that,” said the miller, draining his pewter flagon.

“Then, if what you think of were ever to come to pass,” said the wife, hesitatingly, “would it matter so much?  She will have enough for both, and one cannot be better than happy.”

“You are a woman, and therefore a fool,” said the miller, harshly, striking his pipe on the table.  “The lad is naught but a beggar, and, with these painter’s fancies, worse than a beggar.  Have a care that they are not together in the future, or I will send the child to the surer keeping of the nuns of the Sacred Heart.”

The poor mother was terrified, and promised humbly to do his will.  Not that she could bring herself altogether to separate the child from her favorite playmate, nor did the miller even desire that extreme of cruelty to a young lad who was guilty of nothing except poverty.  But there were many ways in which little Alois was kept away from her chosen companion; and Nello, being a boy proud and quiet and sensitive, was quickly wounded, and ceased to turn his own steps and those of Patrasche, as he had been used to do with every moment of leisure, to the old red mill upon the slope.  What his offence was he did not know; he supposed he had in some manner angered Baas Cogez by taking the portrait of Alois in the meadow; and when the child who loved him would run to him and nestle her hand in his, he would smile at her very sadly and say with a tender concern for her before himself, “Nay, Alois, do not anger your father.  He thinks that I make you idle, dear, and he is not pleased that you should be with me.  He is a good man and loves you well; we will not anger him, Alois.”