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 grandson. No one said anything
to him openly, but all the village agreed together to humor the miller's
prejudice, and at the cottages and farms where Nello and Patrasche
called every morning for the milk for Antwerp, downcast glances and
brief phrases replaced to them the broad smiles and cheerful greetings
to which they had been always used. No one really credited the miller's
absurd suspicions, nor the outrageous accusations born of them, but the
people were all very poor and very ignorant, and the one rich man of the
place had pronounced against him. Nello, in his innocence and his