id. Then,
seeing that Gracieuse has only taken Arrochkoa's hand, she adds:

"Well, you do not kiss your brother?--"

Doubtless, the little Sister Mary Angelique asks for nothing better,
to kiss him with all her heart, with all her soul; to clasp him, her
brother, to lean on his shoulder and to seek his protection, at that
hour of superhuman sacrifice when she must let the cherished one
leave her without even a word of love.--And still, her kiss has in it
something frightened, at once drawn back; the kiss of a nun, somewhat
similar to the kiss of one dead.--When will she ever see him again, that
brother, who is not to leave the Basque country, however? When will
she have news of her mother, of the house, of the village, from some
passer-by who will stop here, coming from Etchezar?--

"We will pray," she says again, "to the Holy Virgin to protect you
in your long voyage--" And how they go; slowly they turn back, like
silent shades, toward the humble convent which the cross protects, and
the two tamed smugglers, immovable on the road, look at their veils,
darker than the night of the trees, disappearing in the obscure avenue.

Oh! she is wrecked also, the one who will disappear in the darkness
of the little, shady hill.--But she is nevertheless soothed by white,
peaceful vapors, and all that she suffers will soon be quieted under a
sort of sleep. To-morrow she will take again, until death, the course of
her strangely simple existence; impersonal, devoted to a series of daily
duties which never change, absorbed in a reunion of creatures almost
neutral, who have abdicated everything, she will be able to walk with
eyes lifted ever toward the soft, celestial mirage--

O crux, ave, spes unica--!

To live, without variety or truce to the end, between the white walls of
a cell always the same, now here, then elsewhere, at the pleasure of a
strange will, in one of those humble village convents to which one
has not even the leisure to become attached. On this earth, to possess
nothing and to desire nothing, to wait for nothing, to hope for nothing.
To accept as empty and transitory the fugitive hours of this world, and
to feel freed from everything, even from love, as much as by death.--The
mystery of such lives remains forever unintelligible to those young men
who are there, made for the daily battle, beautiful beings of instinct
and of strength, a prey to all the desires; created to enjoy life and to
suffer from it, to love