ow, so many
diverse paths had crossed and re-crossed each other, that the dog had a
hard task to retain any hold on the track he followed. But he kept on
his way, though the cold pierced him to the bone, and the jagged ice cut
his feet, and the hunger in his body gnawed like a rat's teeth. But he
kept on his way--a poor, gaunt, shivering, drooping thing in the frozen
darkness, that no one pitied as he went--and by long patience traced the
steps he loved into the very heart of the burgh and up to the steps of
the great cathedral.

"He is gone to the things that he loved," thought Patrasche; he could
not understand, but he was full of sorrow and of pity for the
art-passion that to him was so incomprehensible and yet so sacred.

The portals of the cathedral were unclosed after the midnight mass. Some
heedlessness in the custodians, too eager to go home and feast or sleep,
or too drowsy to know whether they turned the keys aright, had left one
of the doors unlocked. By that accident the footfalls Patrasche sought
had passed through into the building, leaving the white marks of snow
upon the dark stone floor. By that slender white thread, frozen as it
fell, he was guided through the intense silence, through the immensity
of the vaulted space--guided straight to the gates of the chancel, and
stretched there upon the stones he found Nello. He crept up noiselessly,
and touched the face of the boy. "Didst thou dream that I should be
faithless and forsake thee? I--a dog?" said that mute caress.

The lad raised himself with a low cry and clasped him close.

"Let us lie down and die together," he murmured. "Men have no need of
us, and we are all alone."

In answer, Patrasche crept closer yet, and laid his head upon the young
boy's breast. The great tears stood in his brown sad eyes: not for
himself--for himself he was happy.

They lay close together in the piercing cold. The blasts that blew over
the Flemish dykes from the northern seas were like waves of ice, which
froze every living thing they touched. The interior of the immense vault
of stone in which they were was even more bitterly chill than the
snow-covered plains without. Now and then a bat moved in the shadows;
now and then a gleam of light came to the ranks of carven figures. Under
the Rubens they lay together, quite still, and soothed almost into a
dreaming slumber by the numbing narcotic of the cold. Together they
dreamed of the old glad days when they had chased