"I have in my way," Rupert said. "I was wounded in Flanders. I have been home to Bordeaux, and got cured again. I started for the army again, and some tramps who slept in the same room with me robbed me of my last shilling. To complete my disaster, last night, not having money to pay for a bed, I tramped on, fell into a stream, and was nearly drowned."
"Come in," said the miller. "Wife, here is a poor fellow out of luck. Give him a bowl of hot milk, and some bread."
[Chapter 21]: Back in Harness.
"You must have had a bad time of it." the miller said, as he watched Rupert eating his breakfast. "I don't know that I ever saw anyone so white as you are, and yet you look strong, too."
"I am strong," Rupert said, "but I had an attack, and all my colour went. It will come back again soon, but I am only just out. You don't want a man, do you? I am strong and willing. I don't want to beg my way to the army, and I am ashamed of my clothes. There will be no fighting till the spring. I don't want high pay, just my food and enough to get me a suit of rough clothes, and to keep me in bread and cheese as I go back."
"From what part of France do you come?" the miller asked. "You don't speak French as people do hereabouts."
"I come from Brittany," Rupert said; "but I learnt to speak the Paris dialect there, and have almost forgotten my own, I have been so long away."
"Well, I will speak to my wife," the miller said. "Our last hand went away three months since, and all the able-bodied men have been sent to the army. So I can do with you if my wife likes you."
The miller's wife again came and inspected the wanderer, and declared that if he were not so white he would be well enough, but that such a colour did not seem natural.
Rupert answered her that it would soon go, and offered that if, at the end of a week, he did not begin to show signs of colour coming, he would give up the job.