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!"

But Jules, in his white dress and shoulder-knots of blue ribbon, was
toddling across the lawn after a firefly.

Then she began to call him another way. Jules had a vague idea that it
was a part of some game that they sometimes played together. It sounded
like a song, and the words were not like any that he had ever heard
since he came to live with Henri and Brossard. He could not forget them,
though, for had they not sung themselves through that beautiful dream
every time he had it