Heaven help me! But is it possible you have no misgiving?
Tell the truth, now." "Alas! I am full of them; at your words, at your manner, they fly around me in crowds." "Have you no ONE ?" "No." "Then turn your head from me a bit, my sweet young lady; I am an honest woman, though I am not so innocent as you, and I am forced against my will to speak my mind plainer than I am used to." Then followed a conversation, to detail which might anticipate our story; suffice it to say, that Rose, coming into the room rather suddenly, found her sister weeping on Jacintha's bosom, and Jacintha crying and sobbing over her.
She stood and stared in utter amazement.
Dr.Aubertin, on his arrival, was agreeably surprised at Madame Raynal's 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.