Dargaignaratz; and they would meet
over there; perhaps it would be possible to return all together.

During the two weeks since their evening meetings had begun, this was
the first time when he had had the opportunity to talk to her thus in
the day-time and before the others--and their manner was different, more
ceremonious apparently, with, beneath it, a very suave mystery. It was
a long time, also, since he had seen her so well and so near in the
daylight: she was growing more beautiful that spring; she was pretty,
pretty!--Her bust had become rounder and her waist thinner; her manner
gained, day by day, an elegant suppleness. She resembled her brother
still, she had the same regular features, the same perfect oval of the
face; but the difference in their eyes went on increasing: while those
of Arrochkoa, of a blue green shade which seemed fleeting, avoided
the glances of others, hers, on the contrary, black pupils and lashes,
dilated themselves to look at you fixedly. Ramuntcho had seen eyes like
these in no other person; he adored the frank tenderness of them and
also their anxious and profound questioning. Long before he had become a
man and accessible to the trickery of the senses, those eyes had caught,
of his little, childish mind, all that was best and purest in it.--And
now around such eyes, the grand Transformer, enigmatic and sovereign,
had placed a beauty of flesh which irresistibly called his flesh to a
supreme communion.--

They were made very inattentive to their game, the players, by the group
of little girls, of white and pink waists, and they laughed themselves
at not playing so well as usual. Above them, occupying only a small
corner of the old, granite amphitheatre, ascended rows of empty benches
in ruins; then, the houses of Etchezar, so peacefully isolated from the
rest of the world; then, in fine, the obscure, encumbering mass of the
Gizune, filling up the sky and mingling with thick clouds asleep on
its sides. Clouds immovable, inoffensive and without a threat of rain;
clouds of spring, which were of a turtle-dove color and which seemed
tepid, like the air of that evening. And, in a rent, much less elevated
than the summit predominating over this entire site, a round moon began
to silver as the day declined.

They played, in the beautiful twilight, until the hour when the first
bats appeared, until the hour when the flying pelota could hardly be
seen in the air. Perhaps they felt, unconscious