But it was with a sad heart that he said it, and the earth did not look so bright to him as it had used to do when he went out at sunrise under the poplars down the straight roads with Patrasche.  The old red mill had been a landmark to him, and he had been used to pause by it, going and coming, for a cheery greeting with its people as her little flaxen head rose above the low mill wicket, and her little rosy hands had held out a bone or a crust to Patrasche.  Now the dog looked wistfully at a closed door, and the boy went on without pausing, with a pang at his heart, and the child sat within with tears dropping slowly on the knitting to which she was set on her little stool by the stove; and Baas Cogez, working among his sacks and his mill-gear, would harden his will and say to himself, “It is best so.  The lad is all but a beggar, and full of idle, dreaming fooleries.  Who knows what mischief might not come of it in the future?” So he was wise in his generation, and would not have the door unbarred, except upon rare and formal occasions, which seemed to have neither warmth nor mirth in them to the two children, who had been accustomed so long to a daily gleeful, careless, happy interchange of greeting, speech, and pastime, with no other watcher of their sports or auditor of their fancies than Patrasche, sagely shaking the brazen bells of his collar and responding with all a dog’s swift sympathies to their every change of mood.

All this while the little panel of pine wood remained over the chimney in the mill kitchen with the cuckoo clock and the waxen Calvary; and sometimes it seemed to Nello a little hard that while his gift was accepted, he himself should be denied.

But he did not complain; it was his habit to be quiet.  Old Jehan Daas had said ever to him, “We are poor; we must take what God sends—­the ill with the good; the poor cannot choose.”

To which the boy had always listened in silence, being reverent of his old grandfather; but nevertheless a certain vague, sweet hope, such as beguiles the children of genius, had whispered in his heart, “Yet the poor do choose sometimes—­choose to be great, so that men cannot say them nay.”  And he thought so still in his innocence; and one day, when the little Alois, finding him by chance alone among the corn-fields by the canal, ran to him and held him close, and sobbed piteously because the morrow would be her saint’s day, and for the first time in all her life her parents had failed to bid him to the little supper and romp in the great barns with which her feast-day was always celebrated, Nello had kissed her and murmured to her in firm faith, “It shall be different one day, Alois.  One day that little bit of pine wood that your father has of mine shall be worth its weight in silver; and he will not shut the door against me then.  Only love me always, dear little Alois; only love me always, and I will be great.”

“And if I do not love you?” the pretty child asked, pouting a little through her tears, and moved by the instinctive coquetries of her sex.