Marcombes describes in detail the order of their days in the Genevan household. Every morning during their first months in Geneva he taught them rhetoric and Latin; and after dinner they read two chapters of the Old Testament—with “expositions” from Marcombes on those points they did not understand; and before supper they read Roman history in French, and repeated “yᵉ catechisme of Calvin with yᵉ most orthodox exposition” of difficult points; and after supper they read two chapters of the New Testament. And they said their prayers morning and evening, and twice a week they went to church. “There is, my Lord,” ended Marcombes, with a little flourish of self-satisfaction, “a Compendium of our employment!” But all these months no answers to their various letters had come from the Earl in London. They had left London on October 28, and it was apparently the middle of February before the boys heard from their father; and then two packets of his long-expected letters, both written in January, arrived together. The formal, reverential little letters which the boys were in the habit of penning to the Earl were letters chiefly remarkable for their beginnings and endings. They usually began “My most honoured Lord and Father,” and ended with some such peroration, as “with my dayly prayers to God for your Lordship’s long life, health and happiness, and with the desire to be esteemed all my life, My Lord, your most dutiful and obedient Son and humblest Servant.” A modern reader would scarcely credit, from such a peroration, the existence of a deep natural affection; and there was certainly not the kind of untrammelled love of the modern child for the modern parent. And yet the ornate solemnity of these little seventeenth-century letters only cloaked the tender humanity beneath. It was but a literary form; and under it, in spite of the foster-parentage of babyhood, the subservience of youth, and the rigour of parental authority, the strong human love was there in the seventeenth century as now. When the long-expected packets arrived at M. Marcombes’s house in Geneva, and the boys gathered about their governour to receive their father’s letters, so overjoyed and excited was the “Spiritay Robyn” that his hesitation of speech—which had almost disappeared—returned in full force; and for some minutes he stammered and stuttered so atrociously that Frank and Marcombes could scarcely understand what he was saying, and had much ado to “forbeare Laughing.” And what was the Earl’s news? Much had been happening in London, both inside and outside the House of the Savoy, since October 1639; but evidently only an abridged edition reached Marcombes and the boys in Geneva.