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But he did not complain: it was his habit to be quiet: old Jehan Daas had
said ever to him, "We are poor: we must take what God sends--the ill with
the good: the poor cannot choose."

To which the boy had always listened in silence, being reverent of his old
grandfather; but nevertheless a certain vague, sweet hope, such as
beguiles the children of genius, had whispered in his heart, "Yet the poor
do choose sometimes--choose to be great, so that men cannot say them nay."
And he thought so still in his innocence; and one day, when the little
Alois, finding him by chance alone among the cornfields by the canal, ran
to him and held him close, and sobbed piteously because the morrow would
be her saint's day, and for the first time in all her life her parents had
failed to bid him to the little supper and romp in the great barns with
which her feast-day was always celebrated, Nello had kissed her and
murmured to her in firm faith, "It shall be different one day, Alois. One
day that little bit of pine wood that your father has of mine shall be
worth its weight in silver; and he will not shut the door against me then.
Only love me always, dear little Alois, only love me always, and I will be
great."

"And if I do not love you?" the pretty child asked, pouting a little
through her tears, and moved by the instinctive coquetries of her sex.

Nello's eyes left her face and wandered to the distance, where in the red
and gold of the Flemish night the cathedral spire rose. There was a smile
on his face so sweet and yet so sad that little Alois was awed by it. "I
will be great still," he said under his breath--"great still, or die,