He had subsisted mostly upon milk and eggs and a poor and lumpy quality of corn-meal mush, which he had made shift to stir up after many futile efforts.
The first thing which he saw on entering the room to-night was a generous square of light Indian cake on the table.

It was not in a plate, the edges were bent and crumbling, and the whole square looked somewhat flattened.

Barney knew at once that his father had saved it from his own supper, had slipped it slyly into his pocket, and stolen across the field with it.

His mother had not given him a mouthful since she had forbidden him to come home to dinner, and his sister had not dared.
Barney sat down and ate the Indian cake, a solitary householder at his solitary table, around which there would never be any faces but those of his dead dreams.

Afterwards he pulled a chair up to an open window, and sat there, resting his elbows on the sill, staring out vacantly.