mooth as marble over all the Flemish plains, they found
dropped in the road a pretty little puppet, a tambourine-player, all
scarlet and gold, about six inches high, and, unlike greater personages
when Fortune lets them drop, quite unspoiled and unhurt by its fall. It
was a pretty toy. Nello tried to find its owner, and, failing, thought
that it was just the thing to please Alois.

It was quite night when he passed the mill-house: he knew the little
window of her room. It could be no harm, he thought, if he gave her his
little piece of treasure-trove, they had been playfellows so long. There
was a shed with a sloping roof beneath her casement: he climbed it and
tapped softly at the lattice: there was a little light within. The child
opened it and looked out, half frightened.

Nello put the tambourine-player into her hands. "Here is a doll I found
in the snow, Alois. Take it," he whispered,--"take it, and God bless
thee, dear!"

He slid down from the shed-roof before she had time to thank him, and
ran off through the darkness.

That night there was a fire at the mill. Out-buildings and much corn
were destroyed, although the mill itself and the dwelling-house were
unharmed. All the village was out in terror, and engines came tearing
through the snow from Antwerp. The miller was insured, and would lose
nothing: nevertheless, he was in furious wrath, and declared aloud that
the fire was due to no accident, but to some foul intent.

Nello, awakened from his sleep, ran to help with the rest: Baas Cogez
thrust him angrily aside. "Thou wert loitering here after dark," he said
roughly. "I believe, on my soul, that thou dost know more of the fire
than any one."

Nello heard him in silence, stupefied, not supposing that any one could
say such things except in jest, and not comprehending how any one could
pass a jest at such a time.

Nevertheless, the miller said the brutal thing openly to many of his
neighbors in the day that followed; and though no serious charge was
ever preferred against the lad, it got bruited about that Nello had been
seen in the mill-yard after dark on some unspoken errand, and that he
bore Baas Cogez a grudge for forbidding his intercourse with little
Alois; and so the hamlet, which followed the sayings of its richest
landowner servilely, and whose families all hoped to secure the riches
of Alois in some future time for their sons, took the hint to give grave
looks and cold words to old Jehan Daas's