He did not answer, but came towards her with a dazed expression on his face, as if he were groping his way through some strange dream.  “It is time to go in!” he exclaimed, as if repeating some lesson learned long ago, and half forgotten.

Joyce stared at him in open-mouthed astonishment.  The little fellow had spoken in English.  “Oh, you must be Jules,” she cried.  “Aren’t you?  I’ve been wanting to find you for ever so long.”

[Illustration:  “He came towards her with A dazed expression on his face.”]

The boy seemed frightened, and did not answer, only looked at her with big, troubled eyes.  Thinking that she had made a mistake, that she had not heard aright, Joyce spoke in French.  He answered her timidly.  She had not been mistaken; he was Jules; he had been asleep, he told her, and when he heard her singing, he thought it was his mother calling him as she used to do, and had started up expecting to see her at last.  Where was she?  Did mademoiselle know her?  Surely she must if she knew the song.

It was on the tip of Joyce’s tongue to tell him that everybody knew that song; that it was as familiar to the children at home as the chirping of crickets on the hearth or the sight of dandelions in the spring-time.  But some instinct warned her not to say it.  She was glad afterwards, when she found that it was sacred to him, woven in as it was with his one beautiful memory of a home.  It was all he had, and the few words that Joyce’s singing had startled from him were all that he remembered of his mother’s speech.

If Joyce had happened upon him in any other way, it is doubtful if their acquaintance would have grown very rapidly.  He was afraid of strangers; but coming as she did with the familiar song that was like an old friend, he felt that he must have known her sometime,—­that other time when there was always a sweet voice calling, and fireflies twinkled across a dusky lawn.

Joyce was not in a hurry for Marie to come now.  She had a hundred questions to ask, and made the most of her time by talking very fast.  “Marie will be frightened,” she told Jules, “if she does not find me at the gate, and will think that the gypsies have stolen me.  Then she will begin to hunt up and down the road, and I don’t know what she would say if she came and found me talking to a strange child out in the fields, so I must hurry back.  I am glad that I found you.  I have been wishing so long for somebody to play with, and you seem like an old friend because you were born in America.  I’m going to ask madame to ask Brossard to let you come over sometime.”

Jules watched her as she hurried away, running lightly down the road, her fair hair flying over her shoulders and her short blue skirt fluttering.  Once she looked back to wave her hand.  Long after she was out of sight he still stood looking after her, as one might gaze longingly after some visitant from another world.  Nothing like her had ever dropped into his life before, and he wondered if he should ever see her again.