"This is Alois's name-day, is it not?" said the old man Daas that night
from the corner where he was stretched upon his bed of sacking.

The boy gave a gesture of assent: he wished that the old man's memory
had erred a little, instead of keeping such sure account.

"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
young 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 color 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.