nds as I want."

And Jeanne agreed with him.

Dark, dreary December passed slowly away. Everyone stayed at home like
the winter before, but Jeanne's thoughts were too full of Paul for her
ever to feel dull. She would hold him in her arms covering him with
those passionate kisses which mothers lavish on their children, then
offering the baby's face to his father:

"Why don't you kiss him?" she would say. "You hardly seem to love him."

Julien would just touch the infant's smooth forehead with his lips,
holding his body as far away as possible, as if he were afraid of the
little hands touching him in their aimless movements. Then he would go
quickly out of the room, almost as though the child disgusted him.

The mayor, the doctor, and the cure came to dinner occasionally, and
sometimes the Fourvilles, who had become very intimate with Jeanne and
her husband. The comte seemed to worship Paul. He nursed the child on
his knees from the time he entered Les Peuples to the time he left,
sometimes holding him the whole afternoon, and it was marvelous to see
how delicately and tenderly he touched him with his huge hands. He would
tickle the child's nose with the ends of his long moustaches, and then
suddenly cover his face with kisses almost as passionate as Jeanne's. It
was the great trouble of his life that he had no children.

March was bright, dry, and almost mild. The Comtesse Gilberte again
proposed that they should all four go for some rides together, and
Jeanne, a little tired of the long weary evenings and the dull,
monotonous days, was only too pleased at the idea and agreed to it at
once. It took her a week to make her riding-habit, and then they
commenced their rides.

They always rode two and two, the comtesse and Julien leading the way,
and the comte and Jeanne about a hundred feet behind. The latter couple
talked easily and quietly as they rode along, for, each attracted by the
other's straightforward ways and kindly heart, they had become fast
friends. Julien and the comtesse talked in whispers alternated by noisy
bursts of laughter, and looked in each other's eyes to read there the
things their lips did not utter, and often they would break into a
gallop, as if impelled by a desire to escape alone to some country far
away.

Sometimes it seemed as if something irritated Gilberte. Her sharp tones
would be borne on the breeze to the ears of the couple loitering behind,
and the comte would say to Jeanne, wit