Although it was Sunday, Risler, as was his custom, had come to the factory to avail himself of the silence and solitude to work at his press.  Immediately on his arrival, Pere Achille had informed him that his brother was in Paris and had gone to the old house on the Rue de Braque, and he had hastened thither in joyful surprise, a little vexed that he had not been forewarned, and especially that Frantz had defrauded him of the first evening.  His regret on that account came to the surface every moment in his spasmodic attempts at conversation, in which everything that he wanted to say was left unfinished, interrupted by innumerable questions on all sorts of subjects and explosions of affection and joy.  Frantz excused himself on the plea of fatigue, and the pleasure it had given him to be in their old room once more.

“All right, all right,” said Risler, “but I sha’n’t let you alone now—­you are coming to Asnieres at once.  I give myself leave of absence today.  All thought of work is out of the question now that you have come, you understand.  Ah! won’t the little one be surprised and glad!  We talk about you so often!  What joy! what joy!”

The poor fellow fairly beamed with happiness; he, the silent man, chattered like a magpie, gazed admiringly at his Frantz and remarked upon his growth.  The pupil of the Ecole Centrale had had a fine physique when he went away, but his features had acquired greater firmness, his shoulders were broader, and it was a far cry from the tall, studious-looking boy who had left Paris two years before, for Ismailia, to this handsome, bronzed corsair, with his serious yet winning face.

While Risler was gazing at him, Frantz, on his side, was closely scrutinizing his brother, and, finding him the same as always, as ingenuous, as loving, and as absent-minded as times, he said to himself: 

“No! it is not possible—­he has not ceased to be an honest man.”

Thereupon, as he reflected upon what people had dared to imagine, all his wrath turned against that hypocritical, vicious woman, who deceived her husband so impudently and with such absolute impunity that she succeeded in causing him to be considered her confederate.  Oh! what a terrible reckoning he proposed to have with her; how pitilessly he would talk to her!

“I forbid you, Madame—­understand what I say—­I forbid you to dishonor my brother!”

He was thinking of that all the way, as he watched the still leafless trees glide along the embankment of the Saint-Germain railway.  Sitting opposite him, Risler chattered, chattered without pause.  He talked about the factory, about their business.  They had gained forty thousand francs each the last year; but it would be a different matter when the Press was at work.  “A rotary press, my little Frantz, rotary and dodecagonal, capable of printing a pattern in twelve to fifteen colors at a single turn of the wheel—­red on pink, dark green on light green, without the least running together or absorption, without a line lapping over its neighbor, without any danger of one shade destroying or overshadowing another.  Do you understand that, little brother?  A machine that is an artist like a man.  It means a revolution in the wallpaper trade.”