o 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
profound earth, under a slab of granite, near the foundations of his
parish church--those letters in Euskarian tongue which he wrote to her,
after the first months of indignation and of silence, in the city where
she had dragged her fault. "At least, my poor Franchita, my daughter,
are you in a country where the men are pious and go to church
regularly?--" Oh! no, they were hardly pious, the men of the great city,
not more the fashionable ones who were in the society of Ramuntcho's
father than the humblest laborers in the suburban district where
she lived hidden; all carried away by the same current far from the
hereditary dogmas, far from the antique symbols.--And Ramuntcho, in such
surro