His eyes moved languidly under drooping lids, and he wore the careworn look of an invalid. Azor laid his head on the child’s knees, and he caressed him with his thin fingers long and lovingly.
The others soon found their tongues. Azor, they said, used to come every morning, and they romped together. They had known him for a long time in fact; but he had been a month once without appearing, and they had believed he was dead. A dyer’s apprentice, after tying a cord round his neck, had dragged him off, and as they never saw him any more, they had laid his death at the bad boy’s door.
“So that’s the explanation!” the old man muttered, and remembered the long day of agonised suspense when he waited for him at the garret window, and then how he had come back dyed blue. It was a relief to know the truth.
He went again at the same time next day, the dog careering gaily ahead as if he quite understood. Presently all found themselves in the square again, and all faces lit up with a common pleasure.
They became fast friends; he learned their names, and that two of them were brothers of the pale-faced little fellow; their mother always sent them to look after him in the garden; they lived only a few steps away. His heart was filled with compassion for the frail-looking little lad. As Pierre could not walk, he got into the way by degrees of carrying him home in his arms as far as the door, Azor galloping after them, wagging his tail.
One day the child’s mother came down to thank the “kind gentleman,” and they fell into talk. The boy’s father was a workman on the railway, while she worked at fine sewing; the little one was a sore trouble to them; he had to be taken out for fresh air, and constantly looked after; and all hope of cure had had to be abandoned long ago.
“And yet he’s no fool either, sir; of the three he’s the cleverest.”
He only nodded, his head full of a notion that still occupied him after he got home; Azor lay at his feet and watched him thinking, thinking all day long. At nightfall he took the dog’s head between his hands.
“There!” he cried merrily, “you’ll be pleased with your old master this time.”
Three days later he bought a go-cart, in which he installed Pierre, and every morning they used to set out for the country, Azor scouting ahead and his master following with the child in tow.