s, the last of the
name. If I choose to take him from a foreign poorhouse and give him
shelter, it's nobody's business, Louis Brossard, but my own."

With that he strode on up the stairs to his room, the boy still in his
arms. This sudden coming of a four-year-old child into their daily life
made as little difference to Brossard and Henri as the presence of the
four-months-old puppy. They spread a cot for him in Henri's room when
the master went back to Algiers. They gave him something to eat three
times a day when they stopped for their own meals, and then went on with
their work as usual.

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