It made no difference to them that he sobbed in the dark for his mother to come and sing him to sleep,—­the happy young mother who had petted and humored him in her own fond American fashion.  They could not understand his speech; more than that, they could not understand him.  Why should he mope alone in the garden with that beseeching look of a lost dog in his big, mournful eyes?  Why should he not play and be happy, like the neighbor’s children or the kittens or any other young thing that had life and sunshine?

Brossard snapped his fingers at him sometimes at first, as he would have done to a playful animal; but when Jules drew back, frightened by his foreign speech and rough voice, he began to dislike the timid child.  After awhile he never noticed him except to push him aside or to find fault.

It was from Henri that Jules picked up whatever French he learned, and it was from Henri also that he had received the one awkward caress, and the only one, that his desolate little heart had known in all the five loveless years that he had been with them.

A few months ago Brossard had put him out in the field to keep the goats from straying away from their pasture, two stubborn creatures, whose self-willed wanderings had brought many a scolding down on poor Jules’s head.  To-night he was unusually unfortunate, for added to the weary chase they had led him was this stern command that he should go to bed without his supper.

He was about to pass into the house, shivering and hungry, when Henri put his head out at the window.  “Brossard,” he called, “there isn’t enough bread for supper; there’s just this dry end of a loaf.  You should have bought as I told you, when the baker’s cart stopped here this morning.”

Brossard slowly measured the bit of hard, black bread with his eye, and, seeing that there was not half enough to satisfy the appetites of two hungry men, he grudgingly drew a franc from his pocket.

“Here, Jules,” he called.  “Go down to the bakery, and see to it that thou art back by the time that I have milked the goats, or thou shalt go to bed with a beating, as well as supperless.  Stay!” he added, as Jules turned to go.  “I have a mind to eat white bread to-night instead of black.  It will cost an extra son, so be careful to count the change.  It is only once or so in a twelvemonth,” he muttered to himself as an excuse for his extravagance.

It was half a mile to the village, but down hill all the way, so that Jules reached the bakery in a very short time.

Several customers were ahead of him, however, and he awaited his turn nervously.  When he left the shop an old lamplighter was going down the street with torch and ladder, leaving a double line of twinkling lights in his wake, as he disappeared down the wide “Paris road.”  Jules watched him a moment, and then ran rapidly on.  For many centuries the old village of St. Symphorien had echoed with the clatter of wooden shoes on its ancient cobblestones; but never had foot-falls in its narrow, crooked streets kept time to the beating of a lonelier little heart.