d, "Well?" but she always replied: "No, not yet; I
am very much mistaken if I am not _enceinte_."

He also began to think so, and his surprise was only equaled by his
annoyance.

"Well, I can't understand it," was all he could say. "I'll be hanged if
I know how it can have happened."

At the end of a month she began to tell people the news, but she said
nothing about it to the Comtesse Gilberte, for she felt an old feeling
of delicacy in mentioning it to her. At the very first suspicion of his
wife's pregnancy, Julien had ceased to touch her, then, angrily
thinking, "Well, at any rate, this brat wasn't wanted," he made up his
mind to make the best of it, and recommenced his visits to his wife's
room. Everything happened as the priest had predicted, and Jeanne found
she would a second time become a mother. Then, in a transport of joy,
she took a vow of eternal chastity as a token of her rapturous gratitude
to the distant divinity she adored, and thenceforth closed her door to
her husband.

She again felt almost happy. She could hardly believe that it was barely
two months since her mother had died, and that only such a short time
before she had thought herself inconsolable. Now her wounded heart was
nearly healed, and her grief had disappeared, while in its place was
merely a vague melancholy, like the shadow of a great sorrow resting
over her life. It seemed impossible that any other catastrophe could
happen now; her children would grow up and surround her old age with
their affection, and her husband could go his way while she went hers.

Towards the end of September the Abbe Picot came to the chateau, in a
new cassock which had only one week's stains upon it, to introduce his
successor, the Abbe Tolbiac. The latter was small, thin, and very young,
with hollow, black-encircled eyes which betokened the depth and violence
of his feelings, and a decisive way of speaking as if there could be no
appeal from his opinion. The Abbe Picot had been appointed _doyen_ of
Goderville. Jeanne felt very sad at the thought of his departure; he was
connected, in her thoughts, with all the chief events of her life, for
he had married her, christened Paul, and buried the baroness. She liked
him because he was always good-tempered and unaffected, and she could
not imagine Etouvent without the Abbe Picot's fat figure trotting past
the farms. He himself did not seem very rejoiced at his advancement.

"I have been here eighteen years, M