The silence of astonishment fell on everybody; and Joseph, who had risen at the first words, stood stock still like a stone image. The monk who noticed the doubt, shame, and anger in his eyes, thought best to add further explanations. He told us that Benoît had been unable to make his marriage public because of the opposition of a rich relative, who had lent him money for his business, and who might have ruined him by demanding it back. As Mariton feared for her reputation, specially on account of her son Joseph, they had concealed Charlot's birth and had put him to nurse at Saint-Sevère; but, at the end of a year Mariton had found him so ill-used that she begged Brulette to take charge of him, thinking that no one else would give him as much care. She had not foreseen the harm this would do to the young girl, and when she did find it out, she wished to remove the child, but Benoît's illness had prevented her doing so, and moreover Brulette had become so attached to Charlot that she would not part with him. "Yes!" cried Mariton, "poor dear soul that she is, she proved her courage for me. 'You will have trouble enough,' she said to me, 'if you lose your husband; and, perhaps your marriage will be questioned by the family. He is too ill to trouble him now about declaring it. Have patience; don't kill him by talking of your affairs. Everything will come right if God grant that he recovers.'" "And if I have recovered," added Benoît, "it is by the care of this good woman, my wife, and the kindheartedness of the young girl in question, who patiently endured both blame and insult rather than cause me injury at that time by exposing our secrets. And here is another faithful friend," he added, pointing to the monk,--"a man of sense, of action, and of honest speech, an old school friend of mine in the days when I was educating at Montluçon. He it was who went after my old devil of an uncle, and who at last, no later than this morning, persuaded him to consent to my marriage with my good housekeeper; and when my uncle had given his word to make me heir to his whole property, Brother Nicolas told him the priest had already joined Mariton and me, and showed him that fat Charlot, whom he thought a fine boy and very like the author of his existence." Benoît's satisfaction revived the lost gayety of the party; every one was struck with the resemblance, which, however, no one had yet noticed,--I as little as any.