n a manner to be hardly heard:

"And--you will come back to-morrow?"

Then, under his growing mustache, he smiled at this sudden change of
mind and he replied:

"Yes, surely.--To-morrow and every night.--Every night when we shall not
have to work in Spain.--I will come--"

CHAPTER XII.

Ramuntcho's lodging place was, in the house of his mother and above the
stable, a room neatly whitewashed; he had there his bed, always clean
and white, but where smuggling gave him few hours for sleep. Books of
travel or cosmography, which the cure of the parish lent to him, posed
on his table--unexpected in this house. The portraits, framed, of
different saints, ornamented the walls, and several pelota-players'
gloves were hanging from the beams of the ceiling, long gloves of wicker
and of leather which seemed rather implements of hunting or fishing.

Franchita, at her return to her country, had bought back this house,
which was that of her deceased parents, with a part of the sum given to
her by the stranger at the birth of her son. She had invested the rest;
then she worked at making gowns or at ironing linen for the people of
Etchezar, and rented, to farmers of land near by, two lower rooms, with
the stable where they placed their cows and their sheep.

Different familiar, musical sounds rocked Ramuntcho in his bed. First,
the constant roar of a near-by torrent; then, at times, songs of
nightingales, salutes to the dawn of divers birds. And, in this spring
especially, the cows, his neighbors, excited doubtless by the smell of
new-mown hay, moved all night, were agitated in dreams, making their
bells tintillate continually.

Often, after the long expeditions at night, he regained his sleep in the
afternoon, extended in the shade in some corner of moss and grass. Like
the other smugglers, he was not an early riser for a village boy, and
he woke up sometimes long after daybreak, when already, between the
disjointed planks of his flooring, rays of a vivid and gay light came
from the stable below, the door of which remained open always to the
rising sun after the departure of the cattle to their pastures. Then, he
went to his window, pushed open the little, old blinds made of massive
chestnut wood painted in olive, and leaned on his elbows, placed on the
sill of the thick wall, to look at the clouds or at the sun of the new
morning.

What he saw, around his house, was green, green, magnificently green, as
are in the spring