Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/378

344 that I should not go through the fourth grade with him, that I was to leave Turin with my father. He knew nothing. And he sat there, doubled up together, with his big head resting on the desk, making ornaments round the photograph of his father, who was dressed like a machinist, and who is a tall, large man. with a bull neck and a serious, honest look, like himself. And as he sat thus bent together, with his blouse a little open in front, I saw on his bare and robust breast the gold cross which Nelli's mother had presented to him, when she learned that he had protected her son. But I must tell him sometime that I was going away. So I said:—

“Garrone, my father is going away from Turin this autumn, for good.”

He asked me if I were going, also. I replied that I was.

“You will not go through the fourth grade with us?” he said.

I answered, “No.”

He did not speak for a while, but went on with his drawing.

Then, without raising his head, he inquired:—

“And shall you remember your comrades of the third grade?”

“Yes,” I told him, “all of them; but you more than all the rest. Who can forget you?”

He looked at me fixedly and seriously, with a gaze that said a thousand things, but he uttered no word. He only offered me his left hand, pretending to continue his drawing with the other; and I pressed it