Frederick rose.
"What! are you going?"
"Yes, yes! I have to make a call—some business matter I had forgotten! Good-bye!"
Frederick went from the smoking-divan to the Arnoux's residence, as if carried along by a tepid wind, with a sensation of extreme ease such as people experience in dreams.
He found himself soon on the second floor in front of a door, at the ringing of whose bell a servant appeared. A second door was flung open. Madame Arnoux was seated near the fire. Arnoux jumped up, and rushed across to embrace Frederick. She had on her lap a little boy not quite three years old. Her daughter, now as tall as herself, was standing up at the opposite side of the mantelpiece.
"Allow me to present this gentleman to you," said Arnoux, taking his son up in his arms. And he amused himself for some minutes in making the child jump up in the air very high, and then catching him with both hands as he came down.
"You'll kill him!—ah! good heavens, have done!" exclaimed Madame Arnoux.
But Arnoux, declaring that there was not the slightest danger, still kept tossing up the child, and even addressed him in words of endearment such as nurses use in the Marseillaise dialect, his natal tongue: "Ah! my fine picheoun! my ducksy of a little nightingale!"
Then, he asked Frederick why he had been so long without writing to them, what he had been doing down in the country, and what brought him back.
"As for me, I am at present, my dear friend, a dealer in faïence. But let us talk about yourself!"