There were also long and strange meditations, meditations to which the fall of day, the proximity of the church, of the tombs and of their flowers, gave soon a serenity detached from material things and as if free from all alliance with the senses. In her first mystic dreams as a little girl,--inspired especially by the pompous rites of the cult, by the voice of the organ, the white bouquets, the thousand flames of the wax tapers--only images appeared to her--very radiant images, it is true: altars resting on mists, golden tabernacles where music vibrated and where fell grand flights of angels. But those visions gave place now to ideas: she caught a glimpse of that peace and that supreme renunciation which the certainty of an endless celestial life gives; she conceived, in a manner more elevated than formerly, the melancholy joy of abandoning everything in order to become an impersonal part of that entirety of nuns, white, or blue, or black, who, from the innumerable convents of earth, make ascend toward heaven an immense and perpetual intercession for the sins of the world-- However, as soon as night had fallen quite, the course of her thoughts came down every evening fatally toward intoxicating and mortal things. Her wait, her feverish wait, began, more impatient from moment to moment. She felt anxious that her cold companions with black veils should return into the sepulchre of their convent and that she should be alone in her room, free at last, in the house fallen asleep, ready to open her window and listen to the slight noise of Ramuntcho's footsteps. The kiss of lovers, the kiss on the lips, was now a thing possessed and of which they had not the strength to deprive themselves. And they prolonged it a great deal, not wishing, through charming scruples, to accord more to each other. Anyway, if the intoxication which they gave to each other thus was a little too carnal, there was between them that absolute tenderness, infinite, unique, by which all things are elevated and purified. CHAPTER XX. Ramuntcho, that evening, had come to the meeting place earlier than usual--with more hesitation also in his walk, for one risks, on these June evenings, to find girls belated along the paths, or boys behind the hedges on love expeditions. And by chance she was already alone, looking outside, without waiting for him, however. At once she noticed his agitated demeanor and guessed that something new had happened. Not daring to come too near, he made a sign to her to come quickly, jump over the window-sill, and meet him in the obscure alley where they talked without fear. Then, as soon as she was near him, in the nocturnal shade of the trees, he put his arm around her waist and announced to her, brusquely, the great piece of news which, since the morning, troubled his young head and that of Franchita, his mother. “Uncle Ignacio has written.” “True? Uncle Ignacio!”