who had given life to him
through a caprice--

Oh! to burn them, to burn them as quickly as possible, these letters of
misfortune!--And he began to throw them one by one into the fire, where
they were consumed by sudden flames.

A photograph, however, came out of them, fell on the floor; then he
could not refrain from taking it to the lamp to see it.

And his impression was heart-rending, during the few seconds when his
eyes met the half effaced ones of the yellowed image!--It resembled
him!--He found, with profound fear, something of himself in the unknown.
And instinctively he turned round, asking himself if the spectres in the
obscure corners had not come near behind him to look also.

It had hardly an appreciable duration, that silent interview, unique and
supreme, with his father. To the fire also, the image! He threw it, with
a gesture of anger and of terror, among the ashes of the last letters,
and all left soon only a little mass of black dust, extinguishing the
clear flames of the branches.

Finished! The box was empty. He threw on the floor his cap which gave
him a headache, and straightened himself, with perspiration on his
forehead and a buzzing at the temples.

Finished! Annihilated, all these memories of sin and of shame. And now
the things of life appeared to him to regain their former balance; he
regained his soft veneration for his mother, whose memory it seemed
to him he had purified, avenged also a little, by this disdainful
execution.

Therefore, his destiny had been fixed to-night forever. He would remain
the Ramuntcho of other times, the "son of Franchita," player of pelota
and smuggler, free, freed from everything, owing nothing to and asking
nothing from anybody. And he felt serene, without remorse, without
fright, either, in this mortuary house, from which the shades had just
disappeared, peaceful now and friendly--

CHAPTER IX.

At the frontier, in a mountain hamlet. A black night, about one o'clock
in the morning; a winter night inundated by cold and heavy rain. At the
front of a sinister house which casts no light outside, Ramuntcho loads
his shoulders with a heavy smuggled box, under the rippling rain, in the
midst of a tomb-like obscurity. Itchoua's voice commands secretly,--as
if one hardly touched with a bow the last strings of a bass viol,--and
around him, in the absolute darkness, one divines the presence of other
smugglers similarly loaded, ready to start on an adventure