, mother--Oh, we shall not be out late and,
sure, I will be back before mass."

Then, Franchita leaned her head on the solid shoulder of her son, in
a coaxing humor almost infantile, different suddenly from her habitual
manner, and, her cheek against his, she remained tenderly leaning, as
if to say in a confident abandonment of her will: "I am still troubled
a little by those night undertakings; but, when I reflect, what you wish
is always well; I am dependent on you, and you are everything--"

On the shoulder of the stranger, formerly, it was her custom to lean and
to abandon herself thus, in the time when she loved him.

When Ramuntcho had gone to his little room, she stayed thinking for a
longer time than usual before resuming her needlework. So, it became
decidedly his trade, this night work in which one risks receiving the
bullets of Spain's carbineers!--He had begun for amusement, in bravado,
like most of them, and as his friend Arrochkoa was beginning, in the
same band as he; then, little by little, he had made a necessity of this
continual adventure in dark nights; he deserted more and more, for this
rude trade, the open air workshop of the carpenter where she had placed
him as an apprentice to carve beams out of oak trunks.

And that was what he would be in life, her little Ramuntcho, so coddled
formerly in his white gown and for whom she had formed naively so many
dreams: a smuggler! Smuggler and pelota player,--two things which go
well together and which are essentially Basque.

She hesitated still, however, to let him follow that unexpected
vocation. Not in disdain for smugglers, oh, no, for her father had been
a smuggler; her two brothers also; the elder killed by a Spanish bullet
in the forehead, one night that he was swimming across the Bidassoa, the
second a refugee in America to escape the Bayonne prison; both respected
for their audacity and their strength. No, but he, Ramuntcho, the son of
the stranger, he, doubtless, might have had pretensions to lead a less
harsh life than these men if, in a hasty and savage moment, she had
not separated him from his father and brought him back to the Basque
mountains. In truth, he was not heartless, Ramuntcho's father; when,
fatally, he had wearied of her, he had made some efforts not to let her
see it and never would he have abandoned her with her child if, in her
pride, she had not quitted him. Perhaps it would be her duty to-day to
write to him, to ask him t