“Yes, and now I can say what you said to me before. You are lucky and much luckier than I am,” said Cornelli with a trembling voice. “I never can go to my mother because I have none. Now you see how well off I am! I am sure you would never exchange with me, would you?”
Dino looked quite frightened.
“I did not know that you had no mother,” he said, full of pity. In his mind he saw his own mother, the way she looked at him, so full of love that it always lightened his heart whenever anything troubled him. And poor Cornelli had to miss all that!
Even the stable with the horses, the large garden with all the fruit, about which Martha had told him so much, appeared to him now in a different light.
Full of decision he said: “No indeed, I would not change with you.”
But a great pity for the motherless child welled up in Dino’s heart and he longed to be her protector. He could understand now why Cornelli looked so strange; he had even noticed it as soon as he had seen her. There was no mother to fix everything the way it should be.
“We’ll try to be friends, Cornelli! But you must push your hair back from your forehead first of all; one can hardly see your eyes. Nobody wears hair like that. I don’t see how such long hair can stay there without blowing off. What on earth did you paste it on with?”
“With glue,” replied Cornelli.
“How nasty! Come, I’ll cut it all off, and then your eyes and your forehead will be clear. You can hardly see that way.”
Dino had seized the scissors that were lying beside Martha’s work basket, but Cornelli, struggling against him with both hands, fairly screamed: “Let it be. It has to be that way. Put the scissors away!”