The Basque guitar and tambourine accompany the sung seguilla, which the
beggars 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?"