He had not even dared to sit at her side; he remained standing, ready to run under the branches at the least alarm, like a nocturnal prowler.
However, when he prepared to go, it was she who asked, hesitating, and in a manner to be hardly heard:
“And—you will come back to-morrow?”
Then, under his growing mustache, he smiled at this sudden change of mind and he replied:
“Yes, surely.—To-morrow and every night.—Every night when we shall not have to work in Spain.—I will come—”
CHAPTER XII.
Ramuntcho's lodging place was, in the house of his mother and above the stable, a room neatly whitewashed; he had there his bed, always clean and white, but where smuggling gave him few hours for sleep. Books of travel or cosmography, which the cure of the parish lent to him, posed on his table—unexpected in this house. The portraits, framed, of different saints, ornamented the walls, and several pelota-players' gloves were hanging from the beams of the ceiling, long gloves of wicker and of leather which seemed rather implements of hunting or fishing.
Franchita, at her return to her country, had bought back this house, which was that of her deceased parents, with a part of the sum given to her by the stranger at the birth of her son. She had invested the rest; then she worked at making gowns or at ironing linen for the people of Etchezar, and rented, to farmers of land near by, two lower rooms, with the stable where they placed their cows and their sheep.
Different familiar, musical sounds rocked Ramuntcho in his bed. First, the constant roar of a near-by torrent; then, at times, songs of nightingales, salutes to the dawn of divers birds. And, in this spring especially, the cows, his neighbors, excited doubtless by the smell of new-mown hay, moved all night, were agitated in dreams, making their bells tintillate continually.