She stayed later and later in this place which she liked, under the shelter of the rose-laurel coming into bloom, and sometimes even, she came out noiselessly through the window, like a little, sly fox, to breathe there at length, after her mother had gone to bed. Ramuntcho knew this and, every night, the thought of that bench troubled his sleep. CHAPTER XI. One clear April morning, they were walking to the church, Gracieuse and Ramuntcho. She, with an air half grave, half mocking, with a particular and very odd air, leading him there to make him do a penance which she had ordered. In the holy enclosure, the flowerbeds of the tombs were coming into bloom again, as also the rose bushes on the walls. Once more the new saps were awakening above the long sleep of the dead. They went in together, through the lower door, into the empty church, where the old “benoite” in a black mantilla was alone, dusting the altars. When Gracieuse had given to Ramuntcho the holy water and they had made their signs of the cross, she led him through the sonorous nave, paved with funereal stones, to a strange image on the wall, in a shady corner, under the men's tribunes. It was a painting, impregnated with ancient mysticism, representing the figure of Jesus with eyes closed, forehead bloody, expression lamentable and dead; the head seemed to be cut off, separated from the body, and placed there on a gray linen cloth. Above, were written the long Litanies of the Holy Face, which have been composed, as everybody knows, to be recited in penance by repentant blasphemers. The day before, Ramuntcho, in anger, had sworn in an ugly manner: a quite unimaginable string of words, wherein the sacraments and the most saintly things were mingled with the horns of the devil and other villainous things still more frightful. That is why the necessity for a penance had impressed itself on the mind of Gracieuse. “Come, my Ramuntcho,” she recommended, as she walked away, “omit nothing of what you must say.” She left him then in front of the Holy Face, beginning to murmur his litanies in a low voice, and went to the good woman and helped her to change the water of the white Easter daisies in front of the altar of the Virgin. But when the languorous evening returned, and Gracieuse was seated in the darkness meditating on her stone bench, a young human form started up suddenly near her; someone who had come in sandals, without making more noise than the silk owls make in the air, from the rear of the garden doubtless, after some scaling, and who stood there, straight, his waistcoat thrown over one shoulder: the one to whom were addressed all her tender emotions on earth, the one who incarnated the ardent dream of her heart and of her senses-- “Ramuntcho!” she said. “Oh! how you frightened me. Where did you come from at such an hour? What do you want? Why did you come?” “Why did I come? In my turn, to order you to do penance,” he replied, laughing.