The onlookers remained silent, in great astonishment.  Who was this young man whom none had ever seen before?  Assuredly he could not belong to the family, for they would have known his name, have recognized his face?  Why, then, did he address the ancestors by the venerated names of grandfather and grandmother?  And the stupefaction was the greater by reason of his extraordinary resemblance to Mathieu.  Assuredly, he was a Froment, he had the bright eyes and the lofty tower-like forehead of the race.  Mathieu lived again in him, such as he appeared in a piously-preserved portrait representing him at the age of seven-and-twenty when he had begun the conquest of Chantebled.

Mathieu, for his part, rose, trembling, while Marianne smiled divinely, for she understood the truth before all the others.

“Who are you, my child?” asked Mathieu, “you, who call me grandfather, and who resemble me as if you were my brother?”

“I am Dominique, the eldest son of your son Nicolas, who lives with my mother, Lisbeth, in the vast free country yonder, the other France!”

“And how old are you?”

“I shall be seven-and-twenty next August, when, yonder, the waters of the Niger, the good giant, come back to fertilize our spreading fields.”

“And tell us, are you married, have you any children?”

“I have taken for my wife a French woman, born in Senegal, and in the brick house which I have built, four children are already growing up under the flaming sun of the Soudan.”

“And tell us also, have you any brothers, any sisters?”

“My father, Nicolas, and Lisbeth, my mother, have had eighteen children, two of whom are dead.  We are sixteen, nine boys and seven girls.”

At this Mathieu laughed gayly, as if to say that his son Nicolas at fifty years of age had already proved a more valiant artisan of life than himself.

“Well then, my boy,” he said, “since you are the son of my son Nicolas, come and embrace us to celebrate our wedding.  And a cover shall be placed for you; you are at home here.”

In four strides Dominique made the round of the tables, then cast his strong arms about the old people and embraced them—­they the while feeling faint with happy emotion, so delightful was that surprise, yet another child falling among them, and on that day, as from some distant sky, and telling them of the other family, the other nation which had sprung from them, and which was swarming yonder with increase of fruitfulness amid the fiery glow of the tropics.

That surprise was due to the sly craft of Ambroise, who merrily explained how he had prepared it like a masterly coup de theatre.  For a week past he had been lodging and hiding Dominique in his house in Paris; the young man having been sent from the Soudan by his father to negotiate certain business matters, and in particular to order of Denis a quantity of special agricultural machinery adapted to the soil of that far-away region.  Thus Denis alone had been taken into the other’s confidence.