?

"Little Boy Blue, oh, where are you?
O, where are you-u-u-u?"

He only laughed in the dream picture and ran on after the firefly. Then
a man came running after him, and, catching him, tossed him up
laughingly, and carried him to the house on his shoulder.

Somebody held a glass of cool, creamy milk for him to drink, and by and
by he was in a little white night-gown in the woman's lap. His head was
nestled against her shoulder, and he could feel her soft lips touching
him on cheeks and eyelids and mouth, before she began to sing:

"Oh, little Boy Blue, lay by your horn,
And mother will sing of the cows and the corn,
Till the stars and the angels come to keep
Their watch, where my baby lies fast asleep."

Now all of a sudden Jules knew that there was another kind of hunger
worse than the longing for bread. He wanted the soft touch of those lips
again on his mouth and eyelids, the loving pressure of those restful
arms, a thousand times more than he had wished for the loaf that he had
just brought home. Two hot tears, that made his eyes ache in their slow
gathering, splashed down on the window-sill.

Down below Henri opened the kitchen door and snapped his fingers to call
the dog. Looking out, Jules saw him set a plate of bones on the step.
For a moment he listened to the animal's contented crunching, and then
crept across the room to his cot, with a little moan. "O-o-oh--o-oh!" he
sobbed. "Even the dog has more than I have, and I'm _so_ hungry!" He hid
his head awhile in the old quilt; then he raised it again, and, with the
tears streaming down his thin little face, sobbed in a heartbroken
whisper: "Mother! Mother! Do you know how hungry I am?"

A clatter of knives and forks from the kitchen below was the only
answer, and he dropped despairingly down again.

"She's so far away she can't even hear me!" he moaned. "Oh, if I could
only be dead, too!"

He lay there, crying, till Henri had finished washing the supper dishes
and had put them clumsily away. The rank odor of tobacco, stealing up
the stairs, told him that Brossard had settled down to enjoy his evening
pipe. Through the casement window that was still ajar came the faint
notes of an accordeon from Monsieur Greville's garden, across the way.
Gabriel, the coachman, was walking up and down in the moonlight, playing
a wheezy accompaniment to the only song he knew. Jules did not notice it
at first, but after awhile, when he had