"Are you lost?"
The boy jerked and looked up, his emerald eyes focusing on the figure in front of him, hard to make out in the dying light.
Blinking, he shook his head softly, "no, miss. I know where I am."
"My, my," the woman crouched down, pushing her basket of groceries further up her arm, "you are very polite for someone so young. How old are you?"
His face was unreadable for a second as the child appeared to be looking at his arms and legs, then at the floor, and then back at her.
"Four," he answered quietly.
"Really?" she seemed surprised as she glanced around the empty street, "where are your parents?"
The boy frowned, shuffling his feet around in the dirt of the road and afterwards giving her a small shrug, "I don't have any. They're dead, miss."
The woman's face instantly fell to a look of concern and she moved close enough so that he could smell a faint scent of the bread he saw from the bakery. "Would you like me to take you back to your orphanage? It's getting late – they'll be missing you."
He blinked again at the hand she was holding out for him and looked up, putting his mittened hands in her palm. "I don't belong to an orphanage," he gently replied, "I have no home."
Her eyes widened considerably and she stood up, keeping one of his small hands in hers. "Then in that case you're coming home with me. I wouldn't be able to go to sleep tonight knowing I'd left a child out in the rough in this freezing weather."
The boy's eyes lit up and he gave her a tiny smile, "thank you so much, miss!"
"Do you like this kind of bread?" The woman, who the boy had learned whose name was Juliette, put a loaf down in the centre of the table and began to cut slices.
He grinned "It looks delicious, miss Juliette!"
"Do you want jam with it?"
"Yes, please!"
They sat down together and began to eat, the boy eating as quickly as he could without being rude, although his hunger was obvious to the woman.
"When was the last time you ate? You must be starving!"
The blonde child put down his food, and shrugged, "two days ago, maybe. An apple I …took… from the man in the market with the long beard."
She shook her head, almost angrily, "no, no, no. We can't have that at all. From now on I'm going to make sure that you're fed and give you a place to sleep, is that clear?"
He nodded in thanks, "yes, miss Juliette!"
They laughed and joked as they ate, enjoying a warm tea afterwards while Juliette washed the boy's clothes. She wrapped him in a blanket from the spare room in which she decided he would be sleeping while they were waiting for them to dry.
"I will buy you some more clothes tomorrow," she said, putting some more wood in the fire to keep the heat going.
"Ok, miss Juliette," he replied from where he sat on the sofa. Suddenly, a thought came to him. "Say, miss Juliette?"
"mmm?"
"Do you have a husband? Or children?"
"Only a husband, who is away on business right now," she answered as she sat down beside him "I don't think I'm ready to have children yet. Apart from you, of course," she smiled at him.
"Really?"
"Yes, of course… umm…" she trailed off
"What's wrong?" the boy cocked his head to one side.
"I don't even know your name, love."
The child blinked, a smile forming on his face once again that evening. He snuggled closer to her, burying his small face into the crook of her arm.
"I'm Jack," he said.