undings, how would he resist?--

Other reasons, less important perhaps, retained her also. Her haughty
dignity, which in that city had maintained her honest and solitary,
revolted truly at the idea that she would have to reappear as a
solicitor before her former lover. Then, her superior commonsense, which
nothing had ever been able to lead astray or to dazzle, told her that it
was too late now to change anything; that Ramuntcho, until now ignorant
and free, would not know how to attain the dangerous regions where
the intelligence of his father had elevated itself, but that he would
languish at the bottom, like one outclassed. And, in fine, a sentiment
which she hardly confessed to herself, lingered powerfully in the depths
of her heart: the fear of losing her son, of guiding him no longer, of
holding him no longer, of having him no longer.--And so, in that instant
of decisive reflection, after having hesitated for years, she inclined
more and more to remain stubborn in her silence with regard to the
stranger and to let pass humbly near her the life of her Ramuntcho,
under the protecting looks of the Virgin and the saints.--There remained
unsolved the question of Gracieuse Detcharry.--Well, she would marry, in
spite of everything, her son, smuggler and poor though he be! With her
instinct of a mother somewhat savagely loving, she divined that the
little girl was enamoured enough not to fall out of love ever; she had
seen this in her fifteen year old black eyes, obstinate and grave under
the golden nimbus of her hair. Gracieuse marrying Ramuntcho for his
charm alone, in spite of and against maternal will!--The rancor and
vindictiveness that lurked in the mind of Franchita rejoiced suddenly at
that great triumph over the pride of Dolores.

Around the isolated house where, under the grand silence of midnight,
she decided alone her son's future, the spirit of the Basque ancestors
passed, sombre and jealous also, disdainful of the stranger, fearful of
impiety, of changes, of evolutions of races;--the spirit of the Basque
ancestors, the old immutable spirit which still maintains that people
with eyes turned toward the anterior ages; the mysterious antique spirit
by which the children are led to act as before them their fathers had
acted, at the side of the same mountains, in the same villages, around
the same belfries.--

The noise of steps now, in the dark, outside!--Someone walking softly
in sandals on the thickness of th