These thoughts had the effect of communicating to his manner a sort of contemptuous indifference toward his conductor, to whom he ceased to talk. Moser showed neither surprise nor pain and set to whistling an air, interrupted from time to time by some brief word of encouragement to his horses. Thus they arrived at the farm, where the noise of the bells announced their coming. A young boy and a woman of middle age appeared on the threshold. "Ah, it is the father!" cried the woman, looking back into the house, where could be heard the voices of several children, who came running to the door with shouts of joy and pressed around the peasant. "Wait a moment, youngsters," interrupted the father in his big voice as he rummaged in the cart and brought forth a covered basket. "Let Fritz unharness." But the children continued to besiege the farmer, all talking at once. He bent to kiss them, one after another; then rising suddenly: "Where is Jean?" he asked with a quickness that had something of uneasiness in it. "Here, father, here," answered a shrill little voice from the farm-house door; "mother doesn't want me to go out in the rain." "Stay where you are," said Moser, throwing the traces on the backs of the horses; "I will go to you, little son. Go in, the rest of you, so as not to tempt him to come out." The three children went back to the doorway, where little Jean was standing beside his mother, who was protecting him from the weather. He was a poor little creature, so cruelly deformed that at the first glance one could not have told his age or the nature of his infirmity. His whole body, distorted by sickness, formed a curved, not to say a broken line. His disproportionately large head was sunken between two unequally rounded shoulders, while his body was sustained by two little crutches; these took the place of the shrunken legs, which could not support him. At the farmer's approach he held out his thin arms with an expression of love that made Moser's furrowed face brighten. The father lifted him in his strong arms with an exclamation of tender delight. "Come!" he cried, "hug your father--with both arms--hard! How has he been since yesterday?" The mother shook her head. "Always the cough," she answered in a low tone. "It's nothing, father," the child answered in his shrill voice. "Louis had drawn me too fast in my wheeled chair; but I am well, very well; I feel as strong as a man." The peasant placed him carefully on the ground, set him upon his little crutches, which had fallen, and looked at him with an air of satisfaction. "Don't you think he's growing, wife?" he asked in the tone of a man who wishes to be encouraged. "Walk a bit, Jean; walk, boy! He walks more quickly and more strongly. It'll all come right, wife; we must only be patient." The farmer's wife made no reply, but her eyes turned toward the feeble child with a look of despair so deep that Arnold trembled; fortunately Moser paid no heed.