gers, Itchoua on his long
legs walks with his hands resting on Ramuntcho's shoulder. Interested
and ardent for success, since the sum has been agreed upon, Itchoua
whispers in Ramuntcho's ear imperious advices. Like Arrochkoa, he wishes
to act with stunning abruptness, in the surprise of a first interview
which will occur in the evening, as late as the rule of a convent will
permit, at an uncertain and twilight hour, when the village shall have
begun to sleep.

"Above all," he says, "do not show yourself beforehand. She must not
have seen you, she must not even know that you have returned home! You
must not lose the advantage of surprise--"

While Ramuntcho listens and meditates in silence, the others, who lead
the march, sing always the same old song that times their steps. And
thus they re-enter Landachkoa, village of France, crossing the bridge of
the Nivelle, under the beards of the Spanish carbineers.

They have no sort of illusion, the watching carbineers, about what these
men, so wet, have been doing at an hour so black.

CHAPTER X.

The winter, the real winter, extended itself by degrees over the Basque
land, after the few days of frost that had come to annihilate the annual
plants, to change the deceptive aspect of the fields, to prepare the
following spring.

And Ramuntcho acquired slowly his habits of one left alone; in his
house, wherein he lived still, without anybody to serve him, he took
care of himself, as in the colonies or in the barracks, knowing the
thousand little details of housekeeping which careful soldiers practice.
He preserved the pride of dress, dressed himself well, wore the ribbon
of the brave at his buttonhole and a wide crape around his sleeve.

At first he was not assiduous at the village cider mill, where the
men assembled in the cold evenings. In his three years of travel,
of reading, of talking with different people, too many new ideas had
penetrated his already open mind; among his former companions he felt
more outcast than before, more detached from the thousand little things
which composed their life.

Little by little, however, by dint of being alone, by dint of passing
by the halls where the men drank,--on the window-panes of which a lamp
always sketches the shadows of Basque caps,--he had made it a custom to
go in and to sit at a table.

It was the season when the Pyrenean villages, freed from the visitors
which the summers bring, imprisoned by the clouds, the mi