“And why not there?” his grandfather pursued.  “Thou hast never missed a year before, Nello.”

“Thou art too sick to leave,” murmured the lad, bending his handsome head over the bed.

“Tut! tut!  Mother Nulette would have come and sat with me, as she does scores of times.  What is the cause, Nello?” the old man persisted.  “Thou surely hast not had ill words with the little one?”

“Nay, grandfather, never,” said the boy quickly, with a hot colour in his bent face.  “Simply and truly, Baas Cogez did not have me asked this year.  He has taken some whim against me.”

“But thou hast done nothing wrong?”

“That I know—­nothing.  I took the portrait of Alois on a piece of pine; that is all.”

“Ah!” The old man was silent; the truth suggested itself to him with the boy’s innocent answer.  He was tied to a bed of dried leaves in the corner of a wattle hut, but he had not wholly forgotten what the ways of the world were like.

He drew Nello’s fair head fondly to his breast with a tenderer gesture.  “Thou art very poor, my child,” he said, with a quiver the more in his aged, trembling voice; “so poor!  It is very hard for thee.”

“Nay, I am rich,” murmured Nello; and in his innocence he thought so; rich with the imperishable powers that are mightier than the might of kings.  And he went and stood by the door of the hut in the quiet autumn night, and watched the stars troop by and the tall poplars bend and shiver in the wind.  All the casements of the mill-house were lighted, and every now and then the notes of the flute came to him.  The tears fell down his cheeks, for he was but a child; yet he smiled, for he said to himself, “In the future!” He stayed there until all was quite still and dark; then he and Patrasche went within and slept together, long and deeply, side by side.

Now he had a secret which only Patrasche knew.  There was a little outhouse to the hut which no one entered but himself—­a dreary place, but with abundant clear light from the north.  Here he had fashioned himself rudely an easel in rough lumber, and here, on a great gray sea of stretched paper, he had given shape to one of the innumerable fancies which possessed his brain.  No one had ever taught him anything; colours he had no means to buy; he had gone without bread many a time to procure even the few rude vehicles that he had here; and it was only in black or white that he could fashion the things he saw.  This great figure which he had drawn here in chalk was only an old man sitting on a fallen tree—­only that.  He had seen old Michel, the woodman, sitting so at evening many a time.  He had never had a soul to tell him of outline or perspective, of anatomy or of shadow; and yet he had given all the weary, worn-out age, all the sad, quiet patience, all the rugged, care-worn pathos of his original, and given them so that the old, lonely figure was a poem, sitting there meditative and alone, on the dead tree, with the darkness of the descending night behind him.