When Emmanuel de Solis came he found, for the first time in many months, the father and the children reunited.

The young professor, in spite of his reserve, came under the influence of the scene; for Claes's manners and conversation had recovered their former irresistible seduction! Men of science, plunged though they be in abysses of thought and ceaselessly employed in studying the moral world, take notice, nevertheless, of the smallest details of the sphere in which they live.
More out of date with their surroundings than really absent-minded, they are never in harmony with the life about them; they know and forget all; they prejudge the future in their own minds, prophesy to their own souls, know of an event before it happens, and yet they say nothing of all this.

If, in the hush of meditation, they sometimes use their power to observe and recognize that which goes on around them, they are satisfied with having divined its meaning; their occupations hurry them on, and they frequently make false application of the knowledge they have acquired about the things of life.

Sometimes they wake from their social apathy, or they drop from the world of thought to the world of life; at such times they come with well-stored memories, and are by no means strangers to what is happening.
Balthazar, who joined the perspicacity of the heart to that of the brain, knew his daughter's whole past; he knew, or he had guessed, the history of the hidden love that united her with Emmanuel: he now showed this delicately, and sanctioned their affection by taking part in it.
It was the sweetest flattery a father could bestow, and the lovers were unable to resist it.

The evening passed delightfully,--contrasting with the griefs which threatened the lives of these poor children.