"She had seen the hand-organ man from the window."
Nono's eyes gleamed as he listened, and his mouth trembled so he could not speak. "It must have been my father!" he exclaimed at last, and his tears fell fast.
So thought all the family, and the news was soon spread abroad that Nono's father was in Sweden, and was looking for him. Decima had to tell the story over and over again to listeners in the house and listeners without. The colonel and the pastor set on foot an inquiry for the man who had appeared months ago at the hospital, but with no apparent result. The interest in the search gradually died away, and it was the general conclusion that the man had returned discouraged to his native land.
As for Nono, he was quite changed. He did not give up the hope of finding his own father. He seemed always listening, looking out for, expecting something. Yet he did his work faithfully, and was more than ever thoughtful of Karin, and dutiful and obedient towards Jan. There was a special tenderness towards the dear friends in the cottage, as if the time of parting might be near. The likeness of the princess seemed meanwhile to have become especially dear to him. He would stand and look at it long and wistfully, as if he would ask his friend some deep question, or read in her inmost soul.
Pelle watched the boy narrowly, and grew uneasy about him. Nono was not inclined to talk about his father, and Pelle would not force his confidence. He was afraid some wild scheme was forming in the mind of the boy, some plan of going off in search of his father. Pelle took occasion at one time to speak of the sorrow Frans had caused in his home by his disappearance; at another, he enlarged on the dangers that beset young lads without the protecting care of those who understood life better than they did, etc., with innumerable variations.
Nono listened in respectful silence, but with a wandering, wistful look in his eyes.
Alma had been intensely interested in Decima's story. Nono's life was quite like a romance, she said, and she wished she could turn to the last page of the story, as she often did in a book she was reading. She, too, was watching and waiting and expecting. The sound of a hand-organ brought her at once to the window, and many a wandering musician was astonished with questions in Swedish and Italian as to whether he was looking for the golden house, where he had left a baby long ago; what had become of Pionono, the bear; if Francesca were dead, etc. Such questions, put so suddenly and skilfully, Alma fancied would be sure to bring out the truth. The puzzled stragglers often went away from Ekero half suspecting that they were losing their own wits or the young lady had quite lost hers, or that Swedish and Italian were now so confused in their brains that they could fully understand neither. When such wanderers happened to meet Nono on the highroad, they were likely to be further mystified by the dark boy's saying suddenly, "Don't I look like an Italian?" or "I am the baby that was left at the golden house," or some other equally surprising question or announcement.
If Nono chanced to have neglected to speak to such a stranger, he was haunted by the thought that perhaps that very man was his father, and he might have lost his only opportunity of succeeding in his search.
"I shall be glad when winter comes, and these black-haired fellows stop tramping the country round," said Karin one day. "I am tired of the sight of them, and thinking when I see them perhaps they are coming to carry off Nono. What should I do without him? Why, he's just like one of my own boys."