sso been
there.

"You are my prop and safety always. Who would not have done what I did?
Not Santa Felicita herself," she said, with a great sob.

But all this did not cure poor Lolo.

The days and the weeks of the golden autumn weather passed away, and he
was always in danger, and the small close room where he slept with
Sandro and Beppo and Tasso was not one to cure such an illness as had
now beset him. Tasso went to his work with a sick heart in the Cascine,
where the colchicum was all lilac among the meadow grass, and the ashes
and elms were taking their first flush of the coming autumnal change. He
did not think Lolo would ever get well, and the good lad felt as if he
had been the murderer of his little brother.

True, he had had no hand or voice in the sale of Moufflou, but Moufflou
had been sold for his sake. It made him feel half guilty, very unhappy,
quite unworthy of all the sacrifice that had been made for him. "Nobody
should meddle with fate," thought Tasso, who knew his grandfather had
died in San Bonifazio because he had driven himself mad over the
dream-book trying to get lucky numbers for the lottery and become a rich
man at a stroke.

It was rapture, indeed, to know that he was free of the army for a time
at least, that he might go on undisturbed at his healthful labor, and
get a rise in wages as time went on, and dwell in peace with his family,
and perhaps--perhaps in time earn enough to marry pretty flaxen-haired
Biondina, the daughter of the barber in the piazzetta. It was rapture
indeed; but then poor Moufflou!--and poor, poor Lolo! Tasso felt as if
he had bought his own exemption by seeing his little brother and the
good dog torn in pieces and buried alive for his service.

And where was poor Moufflou?

Gone far away somewhere south in the hurrying, screeching, vomiting,
braying train it made Tasso giddy only to look at as it rushed by the
green meadows beyond the Cascine on its way to the sea.

"If he could see the dog he cries so for, it might save him," said the
doctor, who stood with grave face watching Lolo.

But that was beyond any one's power. No one could tell where Moufflou
was. He might be carried away to England, to France, to Russia, to
America,--who could say? They did not know where his purchaser had gone.
Moufflou even might be dead.

The poor mother, when the doctor said that, went and looked at the ten
hundred-franc notes that were once like angels' faces to her, and sa