"I shall find you again on the terrace," said Odile.
The daylight was growing blue in the hollows. That was the hour when waiting for the night does not seem long, and the morrow already dawns in the dreaming mind.
In a few minutes Jean had crossed the yard, followed the corridors of the convent, and opened a door leading to the garden in a sharp angle at the east of the buildings. There it was that all the pilgrims to Sainte Odile met to see Alsace when the weather was clear. A wall, high enough to lean on, runs along the top of an enormous block of rock, advancing like a spur above the forest. It overlooks the pines which cover the slopes everywhere. From the extreme point shut in, like the lantern of a lighthouse, one can see to the right quite a group of mountains, and in front and to the left the plain of Alsace. At this moment the fog was divided into two parts, for the sun was shining on the peaks of the Vosges. All the cloudy mist which did not reach that waving line of peaks, was grey and wan; but just above, almost horizontal rays pierced the mist and coloured it, giving to the second half of the landscape a look of brightness like luminous foam. And this separation showed with what quickness the mist came up from the valley towards the departing sun. The fleecy clouds intermingling, were wafted into the illumined space, were irradiated, showing thus their incessantly changing shapes, and the strength of the motion impelling them, as if the light had summoned their columns to greater heights.
There was at the entrance of this narrow place, arranged for pilgrims and visitors, an old man wearing the costume of the old Alsatians to the north of Strasburg; near him the priest with grey curly hair whom the children had greeted in the morning on the slope of Sainte Odile; a step or two farther on were the young Weissenburg peasants, and at the narrowest spot, squeezed close together on the wall, were the two students who might have been taken for brothers on account of their protruding lips and their beards divided in the middle, one fair, the other chestnut coloured. Both were Alsatians. They exchanged everyday remarks, as is usual among people who do not know each other. When they saw Jean Oberlé they turned round, and they felt themselves suddenly united by a common bond of race which becomes stronger in the face of a common danger.
"Is he a German—that one there?" asked a voice.
The old man who was near the priest cast a glance in the direction of the garden and answered:
"No; he wears his moustache in the French fashion and he looks like one of us."
"I saw him walking with Mademoiselle Odile Bastian, of Alsheim," said the young woman.
The group was reassured, and more so when Jean greeted the priest in Alsatian and asked:
"Are the bells of Alsace late?"