The platform in front of the circus-marquee was now vacant. Inside, in the dim and stifling rotunda, the performance was in full swing.
Only the old woman who sold the tickets sat asleep at her desk. And a little way off, in the light of her lamp, stood a tiny boy.
He was dressed in tights, green on one side, red on the other; on his head he had a fool’s cap with horns.
Close up to the platform stood a woman wrapped in a black shawl. She seemed to be talking to the boy.
He advanced his red leg and his green leg by turns, and drew them back again. At last he took three steps forward on his meagre shanks and held out his hand to the woman.
She took what he had in it, and disappeared into the darkness.
He stood motionless for a moment, then he muttered some words and burst into tears.
Presently he stopped, and said: “Maman m’a pris mon sou!”—and fell to weeping again.
He dried his eyes and left off for a time, but as often as he repeated to himself his sad little history—how his mother had taken his sou from him—he was seized with another and a bitterer fit of weeping.
He stooped and buried his face in the curtain. The stiff, wrinkly oil-painting must be hard and cold to cry into. The little body shrank together; he drew his green leg close up under him, and stood like a stork upon the red one.