When Rico entered the cottage that evening it was later than usual, for he had spent a full half-hour in singing the . As he went in, his cousin came flying towards him.  
"Are you beginning in this style already?" she called out. "The supper stood waiting for you a whole hour: now I have put it away. Go to your bedroom; and if you turn out a good-for-nothing and a scamp, it is no fault of mine. I don't know any thing that I had not rather do than look after a boy like you."
 
Rico never answered a single word, no matter how much his cousin might scold at him; but this evening he looked at her, and said,—
 
"I can get out of your way, cousin."
 
She shoved the bolt in on the house-door with such violence that the door shook, and went into the , slamming that door behind her. Rico went up into his dark little bedroom.
 
On the following day, as all the big family in the other cottage were eating their supper,—the parents, the grandmother, and all the children,—the cousin came running over, and called out from the door to ask if they knew any thing about Rico: she had no idea where he could be.
 
"He will come fast enough when it is time for supper," replied the father quietly.
 
The cousin entered the room. She had been quite sure that the lad was there, and she expected him to come out if she only stood at the door and asked for him.
 
Now she went on to tell them that he had not made his appearance at breakfast, nor at dinner-time, and that he had not been in bed the previous night, for she had found it as she had left it; and she believed that he must have gone away very early in the morning before daybreak, wandering about as he was in the habit of doing, for the bolt was pushed aside on the house-door when she went to open it. She thought at first that she must have forgotten to bolt it the night before in her anger, for nobody knew how angry she had been.
 
"Something has happened to him," said the father, quite unmoved. "He has probably fallen into some up there on the mountain: it often happens to little boys who go climbing about everywhere.
 
"You ought to have spoken of it earlier in the day," he went on slowly. "We shall have to go to look for him, and in the night you can't see any thing."
 
At these words the cousin broke out into a terrible . She expected there would be all sorts of fault found with her; that was always the way when you had suffered for years, and never said any thing about it.
 
"Nobody would ever believe," she said,—and a word then, at least,—"what a sly, cunning, deceitful boy that is, and what a life he has led me these four years. He will turn out a regular vagabond, a tramp, a disgraceful creature."
 
The grandmother had ceased eating fo............