appearance. He inquired after her appetite.

"Oh, as to her appetite," cried the baroness, "that is immense."

"Indeed!"

"It was," explained Josephine, "just when I began to get better, but
now it is as much as usual." This answer had been arranged beforehand by
Jacintha. She added, "The fact is, we wanted to see you, doctor, and
my ridiculous ailments were a good excuse for tearing you from
Paris."--"And now we have succeeded," said Rose, "let us throw off the
mask, and talk of other things; above all, of Paris, and your eclat."

"For all that," persisted the baroness, "she was ill, when I first
wrote, and very ill too."

"Madame Raynal," said the doctor solemnly, "your conduct has been
irregular; once ill, and your illness announced to your medical adviser,
etiquette forbade you to get well but by his prescriptions. Since, then,
you have shown yourself unfit to conduct a malady, it becomes my
painful duty to forbid you henceforth ever to be ill at all, without my
permission first obtained in writing."

This badinage was greatly relished by Rose, but not at all by the
baroness, who was as humorless as a swan.

He stayed a month at Beaurepaire, then off to Paris again: and being now
a rich man, and not too old to enjoy innocent pleasures, he got a habit
of running backwards and forwards between the two places, spending a
month or so at each alternately. So the days rolled on. Josephine fell
into a state that almost defies description; her heart was full of
deadly wounds, yet it seemed, by some mysterious, half-healing balm,
to throb and ache, but bleed no more. Beams of strange, unreasonable
complacency would shoot across her; the next moment reflection would
come, she would droop her head, and sigh piteously. Then all would merge
in a wild terror of detection. She seemed on the borders of a river of
bliss, new, divine, and inexhaustible: and on the other bank mocking
malignant fiends dared her to enter that heavenly stream. The past to
her was full of regrets; the future full of terrors, and empty of hope.
Yet she did not, could not succumb. Instead of the listlessness and
languor of a few months back, she had now more energy than ever; at
times it mounted to irritation. An activity possessed her: it broke out
in many feminine ways. Among the rest she was seized with what we men
call a cacoethes of the needle: "a raging desire" for work. Her fingers
itched for work. She was at it all day. As devotees retire t