Page:Zodiac stories by Blanche Mary Channing.pdf/186

Rh amuse, than in the château beside the boy's couch.

Bertrand's sweet and beautiful mother had died when he was a baby, and he had never known her care, but his faithful nurse Nannette was with him, and her love was the warmest he had experienced.

He took it as a matter of course that his father should live at the family mansion in Paris, and that he had not much time to answer the formal, carefully-written letters which he wrote him every week, under the instructions of the curé. They were not very brilliant letters, for the boy had little to tell in his lonely and monotonous life.

The want he felt most keenly was that of young companions, and it was a grief to him that the village boys were not allowed to come inside the grounds. From his wheel-carriage on the broad terrace, he could see them, brown and sturdy, setting out on fishing trips, with their homemade rods of stripped branches and twine; or