mprison her,
if you please? I have no castle to hide her in--"

Then Itchoua, with the smile of a faun which no one had seen before,
tapped his shoulder:

"Oh, imprison her--for one night only, my son!--It will be enough, you
may believe me.--They are all alike, you see: the first step costs; but
the second one, they make it all alone, and quicker than you may think.
Do you imagine that she would wish to return to the good sisters,
afterward?--"

The desire to slap that dull face passed like an electric shock through
the arm and the hand of Ramuntcho. He constrained himself, however,
through a long habit of respectfulness for the old singer of the
liturgies, and remained silent, with a flush on his cheeks, and his
look turned aside. It revolted him to hear one talk thus of her--and
surprised him that the one who spoke thus was that Itchoua whom he had
always known as the quiet husband of an ugly and old woman. But the
blow struck by the impertinent phrase followed nevertheless, in his
imagination, a dangerous and unforeseen path.--Gracieuse, "imprisoned
a room with him!" The immediate possibility of such a thing, so clearly
presented with a rough and coarse word, made his head swim like a very
violent liquor.

He loved her with too elevated a tenderness, his betrothed, to find
pleasure in brutal hopes. Ordinarily, he expelled from his mind those
images; but now that man had just placed them under his eye, with a
diabolical crudity, and he felt shivers in his flesh, he trembled as if
the weather were cold--

Oh, whether the adventure fell or not under the blow of justice,
well, so much the worse, after all! He had nothing to lose, all was
indifferent to him! And from that evening, in the fever of a new desire,
he felt more boldly decided to brave the rules, the laws, the obstacles
of this world. Saps ascended everywhere around him, on the sides of the
brown Pyrenees; there were longer and more tepid nights; the paths were
bordered with violets and periwinkles.--But religious scruples held him
still. They remained, inexplicably in the depth of his disordered mind:
instinctive horror of profanation; belief, in spite of everything,
in something supernatural enveloping, to defend them, churches and
cloisters--

CHAPTER XII.

The winter had just come to an end.

Ramuntcho,--who had slept for a few hours, in a bad, tired sleep, in
a small room of the new house of his friend Florentino, at
Ururbil,--awakened as