Jeanne blushed to the roots of her hair, but, determined to be ready for every emergency, she argued: "But--but suppose he should not believe me?" The cure knew too well the ins and outs of human nature not to have an answer for that. "Tell everybody you are _enceinte_. When he sees that everyone else believes it, he will soon believe it himself. You will be doing no wrong," he added, to quiet his conscience for advising this deception; "the Church does not permit any connection between man and woman, except for the purpose of procreation." Jeanne followed the priest's artful device, and, a fortnight later, told Julien she thought she was _enceinte_. He started up. "It isn't possible! You can't be!" She gave him her reasons for thinking so. "Bah!" he answered. "You wait a little while." Every morning he asked, "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.