the
ardent desire and the intense fear of contact of their clothes, of a
touch of their hands. Arrochkoa and the Mother Superior follow them
closely, on their heels; without talking, nuns with their sandals,
smugglers with their rope soles, they go through these soft, dark spots
without making more noise than phantoms, and their little cortege, slow
and strange, descends toward the wagon in a funereal silence. Silence
also around them, everywhere in the grand, ambient black, in the depth
of the mountains and the woods. And, in the sky without stars, sleep the
big clouds, heavy with all the water that the soil awaits and which
will fall to-morrow to make the woods still more leafy, the grass still
higher; the big clouds above their heads cover all the splendor of
the southern summer which so often, in their childhood, charmed them
together, disturbed them together, but which Ramuntcho will doubtless
never see again and which in the future Gracieuse will have to look at
with eyes of one dead, without understanding nor recognizing it--

There is no one around them, in the little obscure alley, and the
village seems asleep already. The night has fallen quite; its grand
mystery is scattered everywhere, on the mountains and the savage
valleys.--And, how easy it would be to execute what these two young men
have resolved, in that solitude, with that wagon which is ready and that
fast horse--!

However, without having talked, without having touched each other, they
come, the lovers, to that turn of the path where they must bid each
other an eternal farewell. The wagon is there, held by a boy; the
lantern is lighted and the horse impatient. The Mother Superior stops:
it is, apparently, the last point of the last walk which they will
take together in this world,--and she feels the power, that old nun, to
decide that it will be thus, without appeal. With the same little, thin
voice, almost gay, she says:

"Come, Sister, say good-bye."

And she says that with the assurance of a Fate whose decrees of death
are not disputable.

In truth, nobody attempts to resist her order, impassibly given. He
is vanquished, the rebellious Ramuntcho, oh, quite vanquished by the
tranquil, white powers; trembling still from the battle which has just
come to an end in him, he lowers his head, without will now, and almost
without thought, as under the influence of some sleeping potion--

"Come, Sister, say good-bye," the old, tranquil Fate has sa