of Spain throw, like a slight irony into this lukewarm breeze,
above the dead. And boys and girls think of the fandango of to-night,
feel ascending in them the desire and the intoxication of dancing.--

At last here come the sisters, so long expected by Ramuntcho; with
them advance Gracieuse and her mother, Dolores, who is still in widow's
weeds, her face invisible under a black cape closed by a crape veil.

What can this Dolores be plotting with the Mother Superior?--Ramuntcho,
knowing that these two women are enemies, is astonished and disquiet
to-day to see them walk side by side. Now they even stop to talk aside,
so important and secret doubtless is what they are saying; their similar
black caps, overhanging like wagon-hoods, touch each other and they talk
sheltered under them; a whispering of phantoms, one would say, under
a sort of little black vault.--And Ramuntcho has the sentiment of
something hostile plotted against him under these two wicked caps.

When the colloquy comes to an end, he advances, touches his cap for a
salute, awkward and timid suddenly in presence of this Dolores, whose
harsh look under the veil he divines. This woman is the only person in
the world who has the power to chill him, and, never elsewhere than in
her presence, he feels weighing upon him the blemish of being the child
of an unknown father, of wearing no other name than that of his mother.

To-day, however, to his great surprise, she is more cordial than usual,
and she says with a voice almost amiable: "Good-morning, my boy!" Then
he goes to Gracieuse, to ask her with a brusque anxiety: "To-night, at
eight o'clock, say if you will be on the square to dance with me?"

For some time, every Sunday had brought to him the same fear of being
deprived of dancing with her in the evening. In the week he hardly ever
saw her. Now that he was becoming a man, the only occasion for him to
have her company was this ball on the green of the square, in the light
of the stars or of the moon.

They had fallen in love with each other five years ago, Ramuntcho and
Gracieuse, when they were still children. And such loves, when by chance
the awakening of the senses confirms instead of destroying them, become
in young heads something sovereign and exclusive.

They had never thought of saying this to each other, they knew it so
well; never had they talked together of the future which did not appear
possible to one without the other. And the isolation