was a tremble in his voice.

Nello colored 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 color 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 house-wife, 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 tak