The officer of Customs, at his window beside the gate that shuts in the old town at night, nodded in a surly way as the boy hurried past.  Once outside the gate, Jules walked more slowly, for the road began to wind up-hill.  Now he was out again in the open country, where a faint light lying over the frosty fields showed that the moon was rising.

Here and there lamps shone from the windows of houses along the road; across the field came the bark of a dog, welcoming his master; two old peasant women passed him in a creaking cart on their glad way home.

At the top of the hill Jules stopped to take breath, leaning for a moment against the stone wall.  He was faint from hunger, for he had been in the fields since early morning, with nothing for his midday lunch but a handful of boiled chestnuts.  The smell of the fresh bread tantalized him beyond endurance.  Oh, to be able to take a mouthful,—­just one little mouthful of that brown, sweet crust!

He put his face down close, and shut his eyes, drawing in the delicious odor with long, deep breaths.  What bliss it would be to have that whole loaf for his own,—­he, little Jules, who was to have no supper that night!  He held it up in the moonlight, hungrily looking at it on every side.  There was not a broken place to be found anywhere on its surface; not one crack in all that hard, brown glaze of crust, from which he might pinch the tiniest crumb.

For a moment a mad impulse seized him to tear it in pieces, and eat every scrap, regardless of the reckoning with Brossard afterwards.  But it was only for a moment.  The memory of his last beating stayed his hand.  Then, fearing to dally with temptation, lest it should master him, he thrust the bread under his arm, and ran every remaining step of the way home.

Brossard took the loaf from him, and pointed with it to the stairway,—­a mute command for Jules to go to bed at once.  Tingling with a sense of injustice, the little fellow wanted to shriek out in all his hunger and misery, defying this monster of a man; but a struggling sparrow might as well have tried to turn on the hawk that held it.  He clenched his hands to keep from snatching something from the table, set out so temptingly in the kitchen, but he dared not linger even to look at it.  With a feeling of utter helplessness he passed it in silence, his face white and set.

Dragging his tired feet slowly up the stairs, he went over to the casement window, and swung it open; then, kneeling down, he laid his head on the sill, in the moonlight.  Was it his dream that came back to him then, or only a memory?  He could never be sure, for if it were a memory, it was certainly as strange as any dream, unlike anything he had ever known in his life with Henri and Brossard.  Night after night he had comforted himself with the picture that it brought before him.

He could see a little white house in the middle of a big lawn.  There were vines on the porches, and it must have been early in the evening, for the fireflies were beginning to twinkle over the lawn.  And the grass had just been cut, for the air was sweet with the smell of it.  A woman, standing on the steps under the vines, was calling “Jules, Jules, it is time to come in, little son!”