initely better formed, the profoundness and the mystery
of his thoughts are also much more unfathomable.

And it oppresses them to conceive things which they are powerless to
tell; then their embarrassed looks return absent-mindedly to the two
beautiful, big oxen:

"They are mine, you know," says Florentino. "I was married two
years ago.--My wife works. And, by working--we are beginning to get
along.--Oh!" he adds, with naive pride, "I have another pair of oxen
like these at the house."

Then he ceases to talk, flushing suddenly under his sunburn, for he has
the tact which comes from the heart, which the humblest possess often by
nature, but which education never gives, even to the most refined people
in the world: considering the desolate return of Ramuntcho, his broken
destiny, his betrothed buried over there among the black nuns, his
mother dying, Florentino is afraid to have been already too cruel in
displaying too much his own happiness.

Then the silence returned; they looked at each other for an instant
with kind smiles, finding no words. Besides, between them, the abyss
of different conceptions has grown deeper in these three years. And
Florentino, touching anew the foreheads of his oxen, makes them march
again with a call of his tongue, and presses tighter the hand of his
friend:

"We shall see each other again, shall we not?"

And the noise of the cow-bells is soon lost in the calm of the road more
shady, where begins to diminish the heat of the day--

"Well, he has succeeded in life, that one!" thinks Ramuntcho
lugubriously, continuing his walk under the autumn branches--

The road which he follows ascends, hollowed here and there by springs
and sometimes crossed by big roots of oaks.

Soon Etchezar will appear to him and, before seeing it, the image of
it becomes more and more precise in him, recalled and enlivened in his
memory by the aspect of the surroundings.

Empty now, all this land, where Gracieuse is no more, empty and sad as
a beloved home where the great Reaper has passed!--And yet Ramuntcho, in
the depths of his being, dares to think that, in some small convent over
there, under the veil of a nun, the cherished black eyes still exist and
that he will be able at least to see them; that taking the veil is not
quite like dying, and that perhaps the last word of his destiny has not
been said irrevocably.--For, when he reflects, what can have changed
thus the soul of Gracieuse, formerly so