She shuddered at first under the supreme question, realizing well, that if he dared to question her thus, it was because she was lost. Then, she hesitated for a moment: in her head, boiling from fever, there was a battle; her duty, she discerned well no longer; her obstinacy which had lasted for so many years faltered almost at this hour, in presence of the sudden apparition of death-- But, resolved at last forever, she replied at once, in the brusque tone of her bad days: “Your father!--And what is the use, my son?--What do you want of your father who for twenty years has never thought of you?--” No, it was decided, ended, she would not tell. Anyway, it was too late now; at the moment when she would disappear, enter into the inert powerlessness of the dead, how could she risk changing so completely the life of that son over whom she would no longer watch, how could she surrender him to his father, who perhaps would make of him a disbeliever and a disenchanted man like himself! What a responsibility and what an immense terror--! Her decision having been taken irrevocably, she thought of herself, feeling for the first time that life was closing behind her, and joined her hands for a sombre prayer. As for Ramuntcho, after this attempt to learn, after this great effort which had almost seemed a profanation to him, he bent his head before his mother's will and questioned no longer. CHAPTER VII. It went very quickly now, with the drying fevers that made her cheeks red, her nostrils pinched, or with the exhaustion of baths of perspiration, her pulse hardly beating. And Ramuntcho had no other thought than his mother; the image of Gracieuse ceased to visit him during these funereal days. She was going, Franchita; she was going, mute and as if indifferent, asking for nothing, never complaining-- Once, however, as he was watching, she called him suddenly with a poor voice of anguish, to throw her arms around him, to draw him to her, lean her head on his cheek. And, in that minute, Ramuntcho saw pass in her eyes the great Terror--that of the flesh which feels that it is finishing, that of the men and that of the beasts, the horrible and the same for all.--A believer, she was that a little; practising rather, like so many other women around her; timid in the face of dogmas, of observances, of services, but without a clear conception of the world beyond, without a luminous hope.--Heaven, all the beautiful things promised after life.--Yes, perhaps.--But still, the black hole was there, near and certain, where she would have to turn into dust.--What was sure, what was inexorable, was the fact that never, never more would her destroyed visage lean in a real manner on that of Ramuntcho; then, in the doubt of having a mind which would fly, in the horror and the misery of annihilation, of becoming powder and nothing, she wanted again kisses from that son, and she clutched at him as clutch the wrecked who fall into the black and deep waters--