All thought of work is out of the question now that you have come, you understand.

Ah! won't the little one be surprised and glad! We talk about you so often! What joy! what joy!" The poor fellow fairly beamed with happiness; he, the silent man, chattered like a magpie, gazed admiringly at his Frantz and remarked upon his growth.

The pupil of the Ecole Centrale had had a fine physique when he went away, but his features had acquired greater firmness, his shoulders were broader, and it was a far cry from the tall, studious-looking boy who had left Paris two years before, for Ismailia, to this handsome, bronzed corsair, with his serious yet winning face.
While Risler was gazing at him, Frantz, on his side, was closely scrutinizing his brother, and, finding him the same as always, as ingenuous, as loving, and as absent-minded as times, he said to himself: "No! it is not possible--he has not ceased to be an honest man." Thereupon, as he reflected upon what people had dared to imagine, all his wrath turned against that hypocritical, vicious woman, who deceived her husband so impudently and with such absolute impunity that she succeeded in causing him to be considered her confederate.

Oh! what a terrible reckoning he proposed to have with her; how pitilessly he would talk to her! "I forbid you, Madame--understand what I say--I forbid you to dishonor my brother!" He was thinking of that all the way, as he watched the still leafless trees glide along the embankment of the Saint-Germain railway.

Sitting opposite him, Risler chattered, chattered without pause.