When the time came to say good-bye, Jeanne and Poulet clung to each other as if they could not part, while Aunt Lison stood, quite forgotten, in the background, with her face buried in her handkerchief. The baron felt he too was giving way, so he hastened the farewells, and took his daughter from the college. The landau was waiting at the door, and they drove back to Les Peuples in a silence that was only broken by an occasional sob. Jeanne wept the whole of the following day, and the next she ordered the phaeton and drove over to Havre. Poulet seemed to have got over the separation already; It was the first time he had ever had any companions of his own age, and, as he sat beside his mother, he fidgeted on his chair and longed to run out and play. Every other day Jeanne went to see him, and on Sundays took him out. She felt as though she had not energy enough to leave the college between the recreation hours, so she waited in the _parloir_ while the classes were going on until Poulet could come to her again. At last the head master asked her to go up and see him, and begged her not to come so often. She did not take any notice of his request, and he warned her that if she still persisted in preventing her son from enjoying his play hours, and in interrupting his work, he would be obliged to dismiss him from the college. He also sent a note to the baron, to the same effect, and thenceforth Jeanne was always kept in sight at Les Peuples, like a prisoner. She lived in a constant state of nervous anxiety, and looked forward to the holidays with more impatience than her son. She began to take long walks about the country, with Massacre as her only companion, and would stay out of doors all day long, dreamily musing. Sometimes she sat on the cliff the whole afternoon watching the sea; sometimes she walked, across the wood, to Yport, thinking, as she went, of how she had walked there when she was young, and of the long, long years which had elapsed since she had bounded along these very paths, a hopeful, happy girl. Every time she saw her son, it seemed to Jeanne as if ten years had passed since she had seen him last; for every month he became more of a man, and every month she became more aged. Her father looked like her brother, and Aunt Lison (who had been quite faded when she was twenty-five, and had never seemed to get older since) might have been taken for her elder sister. Poulet did not study very hard; he spent two years in the fourth form, managed to get through the third in one twelvemonth, then spent two more in the second, and was nearly twenty when he reached the rhetoric class. He had grown into a tall, fair youth, with whiskered cheeks and a budding moustache. He came over to Les Peuples every Sunday now, instead of his mother going to see him; and as he had been taking riding lessons for some time past, he hired a horse and accomplished the journey from Havre in two hours.