I've found you again, and you are as gentle and loving as you always were.

Ah! you cannot know how delightful it seems to me." Then the priest's eyes also were dimmed by tears.

Amidst the deep quietude, the great sense of comfort which had followed their violent emotion, the brothers found an infinite charm in being together once more in the home of their childhood.* It was there that both their father and mother had died--the father tragically, struck down by an explosion in his laboratory; the mother piously, like a very saint.

It was there, too, in that same bed, that Guillaume had nursed Pierre, when, after their mother's death, the latter had nearly died; and it was there now that Pierre in his turn was nursing Guillaume.

All helped to bow them down and fill them with emotion: the strange circumstances of their meeting, the frightful catastrophe which had caused them such a shock, the mysteriousness of the things which remained unexplained between them.