"Only twelve days; only ten; only seven. I will drive to Chalons to meet him," said Lumineau. "And I will make him some porridge," said Rousille, "he used to be so fond of it before he joined his regiment." "And I" said Mathurin, "will go in the punt with him the first time he looks up his friends." "How much there will be to hear!" exclaimed Rousille. "When he was home on furlough he had an endless store of tales to tell. As for me, I shall have no time to listen to them. I shall have to send him to you, Mathurin. And what a change it will make in the house to have a chatterbox among us." Then she added, with the grave air of one entrusted with the household purse: "One change we must make, father, and that will be to buy a paper on Sunday. He will not like to go without one; our André is sure to want to know the news." "He is young," said the father, as if to excuse him. And all André's predilections, every recollection connected with him, all the hopes that centred in his return were incessantly recapitulated by one and the other in the living-room of La Fromentière, where the caress of such discourses must have ascended more than once to the smoke-stained rafters. Meanwhile the son thus occupying all their thoughts had not been told by any of them of the going of François and Eléonore. Partly from dislike to letter-writing, but principally to spare him pain, and to avoid giving him bad news on the eve of his homecoming, the blow which had so diminished the number of those he was to rejoin had been withheld from him. For they could not tell how he would take the absence of his favourite brother, his childhood's companion; it would be better to break the news to him gently, when he should have come back to France, back to his home. Soon a letter came, bearing the Algiers postmark, giving from day to day the itinerary of the journey; and under the elms of La Fromentière would be heard, every successive four-and-twenty hours, announced by one of the family lovingly, meditated over by the others, "Now Driot must be leaving Algiers." "Now Driot is on the sea." "Now Driot is in the train for Marseilles." "Children, he has reached the soil of France."