The hour, one knew not why, became strangely solemn, as if the shade of past centuries was to come out of the soil.

On the vast lifting-up which is called the Pyrenees, one felt something soaring which was, perhaps, the finishing mind of that race, the fragments of which have been preserved and to which Ramuntcho belonged by his mother-- And the child, composed of two essences so diverse, who was walking alone toward his dwelling, through the night and the rain, began again in the depth of his double being to feel the anxiety of inexplicable reminiscences.
At last he arrived in front of his house,--which was very elevated, in the Basque fashion, with old wooden balconies under narrow windows, the glass of which threw into the night the light of a lamp.

As he came near the entrance, the light noise of his walk became feebler in the thickness of the dead leaves: the leaves of those plane-trees shaped like vaults which, according to the usage of the land, form a sort of atrium before each dwelling.
She recognized from afar the steps of her son, the serious Franchita, pale and straight in her black clothes,--the one who formerly had loved and followed the stranger; then, who, feeling her desertion approaching, had returned courageously to the village in order to inhabit alone the dilapidated house of her deceased parents.

Rather than to live in the vast city, and to be troublesome and a solicitor there, she had quickly resolved to depart, to renounce everything, to make a simple Basque peasant of that little Ramuntcho, who, at his entrance in life, had worn gowns embroidered in white silk.
It was fifteen years ago, fifteen years, when she returned, clandestinely, at a fall of night similar to this one.

In the first days of this return, dumb and haughty to her former companions from fear of their disdain, she would go out only to go to church, her black cloth mantilla lowered on her eyes.