see it and never would he have abandoned her with her child if, in her
pride, she had not quitted him. Perhaps it would be her duty to-day to
write to him, to ask him to think of his son--

And now the image of Gracieuse presented itself naturally to her mind, as
it did every time she thought of Ramuntcho's future. She was the little
betrothed whom she had been wishing for him for ten years. (In the
sections of country unacquainted with modern fashions, it is usual to
marry when very young and often to know and select one another for
husband and wife in the first years of life.) A little girl with hair
fluffed in a gold mist, daughter of a friend of her childhood, of a
certain Dolores Detcharry, who had been always conceited--and who had
remained contemptuous since the epoch of the great fault.

Certainly, the father's intervention in the future of Ramuntcho would
have a decisive influence in obtaining the hand of that girl--and would
permit even of asking it of Dolores with haughtiness, after the ancient
quarrel. But Franchita felt a great uneasiness in her, increasing as the
thought of addressing herself to that man became more precise. And then,
she recalled the look, so often sombre, of the stranger, she recalled his
vague words of infinite lassitude, of incomprehensible despair; he had
the air of seeing always, beyond her horizon, distant abysses and
darkness, and, although he was not an insulter of sacred things, never
would he pray, thus giving to her this excess of remorse, of having
allied herself to some pagan to whom heaven would be closed forever. His
friends were similar to him, refined also, faithless, prayerless,
exchanging among themselves in frivolous words abysmal thoughts.--Oh, if
Ramuntcho by contact with them were to become similar to them
all!--desert the churches, fly from the sacraments and the mass!--Then,
she remembered the letters of her old father,--now decomposed in the