“But what shall I tell him?” asked Erik, pale with joy.

“Tell him that to-morrow you will set out by express, to go and embrace him and your mother!”

The young captain only took time to press the hands of this excellent man, and he ran and jumped into a cab to hasten to the telegraph office.

He left Stockholm that same day, took the railroad to Malmo on the north-west coast of Sweden, crossed the strait in twenty minutes, reached Copenhagen, took the express train through to Holland and Belgium, and at Brussels the train for Paris.

On Saturday, at seven o’clock in the evening, exactly six days after Mr. Durrien had posted his letter, he had the joy of waiting for his grandson at the depot.

As soon as the train stopped they fell into each other’s arms.  They had thought so much about each other during these last few days that they both felt already well acquainted.

“My mother?” asked Erik.

“I have not dared to tell her, much as I was tempted to do so!” answered Mr. Durrien.

“And she knows nothing yet?”

“She suspects something, she fears, she hopes.  Since your dispatch I have done my best to prepare her for the unheard-of joy that awaits her.  I told her of a track upon which I had been placed by a young Swedish officer, the one whom I had met at Brest, and of whom I had often spoken to her.  She does not know, she hesitates to hope for any good news, but this morning at breakfast I could see her watching me, and two or three times I felt afraid that she was going to question me.  One can not tell, something might have happened to you, some other misfortune, some sudden mischance.  So I did not dine with her to-night, I made an excuse to escape from a situation intolerable to me.”

Without waiting for his baggage, they departed in the coup that Mr. Durrien had brought.

Mme. Durrien, alone in the parlor in Varennes Street, awaited impatiently the return of her father.  She had had her suspicions aroused, and was only waiting until the dinner hour arrived to ask for an explanation.

For several days she had been disturbed by his strange behavior, by the dispatches which were continually arriving, and by the double meaning which she thought she detected beneath all he said.  Accustomed to talk with him about his lightest thoughts and impressions, she could not understand why he should seek to conceal anything from her.  Several times she had been on the point of demanding a solution of the enigma, but she had kept silence, out of respect for the evident wishes of her father.

“He is trying to prepare me for some surprise, doubtless,” she said to herself.  “He is sure to tell me if anything pleasant has occurred.”