It is above, on the hill; it is that isolated house which a cross surmounts and which one sees in relief in white on the darker mass of the mountain. They recommend that as soon as the horse is rested the wagon be brought to them, at a turn, to wait for them. Then, both go into the avenue of trees which leads to that convent and where the thickness of the May foliage makes the obscurity almost nocturnal. Without saying anything to each other, without making a noise with their sandals, they ascend in a supple and easy manner; around them the profound fields are impregnated by the immense melancholy of the night. Arrochkoa knocks with his finger on the door of the peaceful house: “I would like to see my sister, if you please,” he says to an old nun who opens the door, astonished-- Before he has finished talking, a cry of joy comes from the dark corridor, and a nun, whom one divines is young in spite of the envelopment of her dissembling costume, comes and takes his hand. She has recognized him by his voice,--but has she divined the other who stays behind and does not talk?-- The Mother Superior has come also, and, in the darkness of the stairway, she makes them go up to the parlor of the little country convent; then she brings the cane-seat chairs and everyone sits down, Arrochkoa near his sister, Ramuntcho opposite,--and they face each other at last, the two lovers, and a silence, full of the beating of arteries, full of leaps of hearts, full of fever, descends upon them-- Truly, in this place, one knows not what peace almost sweet, and a little sepulchral also, envelopes the terrible interview; in the depth of the chests, the hearts beat with great blows, but the words of love or of violence, the words die before passing the lips.--And this peace, more and more establishes itself; it seems as if a white shroud little by little is covering everything, in order to calm and to extinguish. There is nothing very peculiar, however, in this humble parlor: four walls absolutely bare under a coat of whitewash; a wooden ceiling; a floor where one slips, so carefully waxed it is; on a table, a plaster Virgin, already indistinct, among all the similar white things of the background where the twilight of May is dying. And a window without curtains, open on the grand Pyrenean horizons invaded by night.--But, from this voluntary poverty, from this white simplicity, is exhaled a notion of definitive impersonality, of renunciation forever; and the irremediability of accomplished things begins to manifest itself to the mind of Ramuntcho, while bringing to him a sort of peace, of sudden and involuntary resignation. The two smugglers, immovable on their chairs, appear as silhouettes, of wide shoulders on all this white of the walls, and of their lost features one hardly sees the black more intense of the mustache and the eyes. The two nuns, whose outlines are unified by the veil, seem already to be two spectres all black--