It was a long time, also, since he had seen her so well and so near in the daylight: she was growing more beautiful that spring; she was pretty, pretty!--Her bust had become rounder and her waist thinner; her manner gained, day by day, an elegant suppleness.

She resembled her brother still, she had the same regular features, the same perfect oval of the face; but the difference in their eyes went on increasing: while those of Arrochkoa, of a blue green shade which seemed fleeting, avoided the glances of others, hers, on the contrary, black pupils and lashes, dilated themselves to look at you fixedly.

Ramuntcho had seen eyes like these in no other person; he adored the frank tenderness of them and also their anxious and profound questioning.

Long before he had become a man and accessible to the trickery of the senses, those eyes had caught, of his little, childish mind, all that was best and purest in it .-- And now around such eyes, the grand Transformer, enigmatic and sovereign, had placed a beauty of flesh which irresistibly called his flesh to a supreme communion .-- They were made very inattentive to their game, the players, by the group of little girls, of white and pink waists, and they laughed themselves at not playing so well as usual.

Above them, occupying only a small corner of the old, granite amphitheatre, ascended rows of empty benches in ruins; then, the houses of Etchezar, so peacefully isolated from the rest of the world; then, in fine, the obscure, encumbering mass of the Gizune, filling up the sky and mingling with thick clouds asleep on its sides.