The turning point in a not very eventful story comes when Ramuntcho, smuggler and pelota champion, returns to his village after three years of military service and finds that Gracieuse, whom he was expecting to marry in spite of her mother's opposition, has been coerced into entering a convent.
In the last scene, Gracieuse is challenged by her Mother Superior to make the choice between God and her lover, applying so much emotional pressure that the young nun drops dead under the stress of it.
It was greeted at the time as ‘full of the conflicting languor, passion and religious fervour of the Basque Country’, and supplied much of the local colour so lovingly described in the novel but difficult to represent on the stage.
2 begins with the Cider House which reflects the conviviality of the place where Ramuntcho and his smuggler companions would plot their sorties into Spain and, no doubt, entertain themselves with folk tunes like the two introduced separately at first and combined in the closing bars.
The Convent is a contrastingly ethereal piece reflecting in its scoring for muted strings the rarefied atmosphere of the nunnery and, with the entry of an ancient Basque canticle on woodwind, anticipating the death of Gracieuse.