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 appetites of two hungry men, he grudgingly drew a franc from his pocket.
"Here, Jules," he called.