Without, the gale blew violently; its rage seemed to increase. The moon, then at its fullest, cast enough light, despite the whirls of snow, to guide Yvon's steps. He struck the road to the Fountain of the Hinds in haste, moving with firm though rapid strides. The infernal food he had just partaken of returned to him his pristine strength. About two leagues from his hut, he stopped, struck with a sudden thought. The mastiff he had killed was enormous, fleshy and fat. It could furnish his family with food for at least three or four days. Why had he forgotten to bring it along? Yvon turned back to the tavern, long though the road was. As he approached the house of Gregory he noticed a great brilliancy from afar and across the falling snow. The light proceeded from the door and window of the tavern. Only two hours before when he left, the hearth was extinct and the place dark. Could someone have gone in afterwards and rekindled the fire? Yvon crept near the house hoping to carry off the dog without attracting notice, but voices reached him saying: "Friends, let us wait till the dog is well roasted." "I'm hungry! Devilish hungry!" "So am I ... but I have more patience than you, who would have eaten the dainty raw.... Pheu! What a smell comes from that charnel room! And yet the door and window are open!" "Never mind the smell!... I'm hungry!" "So, then, Master Gregory the Hollow-bellied slaughtered the travelers to rob them, I suppose.... One of them must have been beforehand with him and killed him.... But the devil take the tavern-keeper! His dog is now roasted. Let's eat!" "Let's eat!" CHAPTER V. THE DELIRIUM OF STARVATION. Too old a man to think of contesting the spoils for which he had returned to Gregory's tavern, Yvon hurried back home and reached his hut towards midnight. On entering, a torch of resinous wood, fastened near the wall by an iron ring, lighted a heart-rending spectacle. Stretched out near the hearth lay Den-Brao, his face covered by his mason's jacket; himself expiring of inanition, he wished to escape the sight of the agony of his family. His wife, Gervaise, so thin that the bones of her face could be counted, was on her knees near a straw pallet where Julyan lay in convulsions. Almost fainting, Gervaise struggled with her son who was alternately crying with fury and with pain and in the frenzy of starvation sought to apply its teeth to his own arms. Nominoe, the elder, lay flat on his face, on the pallet with his brother. He would have been taken for dead but for the tremor that from time to time ran over his frame still more emaciated than his brother's. Finally Jeannette, about three years old, murmured in her cradle with a dying voice: "Mother ... I am hungry.... I am hungry!" At the sound of Yvon's steps, Gervaise turned her head: "Father!" said she in despair, "if you bring nothing with you, I shall kill my children to shorten their agony ... and then myself!"