At midnight, she wished him to go, as she had decided in advance, in her little thoughtful and obstinate head. Therefore, after having embraced each other for a long time, they quitted each other, as if the separation were, at this precise minute, an ineluctable thing which it was impossible to retard. And while she returned to her room with sobs that he heard, he scaled over the wall and, in coming out of the darkness of the foliage, found himself on the deserted road, white with lunar rays. At this first separation, he suffered less than she, because he was going, because it was he that the morrow, full of uncertainty, awaited. While he walked on the road, powdered and clear, the powerful charm of change, of travel, dulled his sensitiveness; almost without any precise thought, he looked at his shadow, which the moon made clear and harsh, marching in front of him. And the great Gizune dominated impassibly everything, with its cold and spectral air, in all this white radiance of midnight. CHAPTER XXVI. The parting day, good-byes to friends here and there; joyful wishes of former soldiers returned from the regiment. Since the morning, a sort of intoxication or of fever, and, in front of him, everything unthought-of in life. Arrochkoa, very amiable on that last day, had offered to drive him in a wagon to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and had arranged to go at sunset, in order to arrive there just in time for the night train. The night having come, inexorably, Franchita wished to accompany her son to the square, where the Detcharry wagon was waiting for him, and here her face, despite her will, was drawn by sorrow, while he straightened himself, in order to preserve the swagger which becomes recruits going to their regiment: “Make a little place for me, Arrochkoa,” she said abruptly. “I will sit between you to the chapel of Saint-Bitchentcho; I will return on foot--” And they started at the setting sun, which, on them as on all things, scattered the magnificence of its gold and of its red copper. After a wood of oaks, the chapel of Saint-Bitchentcho passed, and the mother wished to remain. From one turn to another, postponing every time the great separation, she asked to be driven still farther. “Mother, when we reach the top of the Issaritz slope you must go down!” he said tenderly. “You hear, Arrochkoa, you will stop where I say; I do not want mother to go further--” At this Issaritz slope the horse had himself slackened his pace. The mother and the son, their eyes burned with suppressed tears, held each other's hands, and they were going slowly, slowly, in absolute silence, as if it were a solemn ascent toward some Calvary. At last, at the top of the slope, Arrochkoa, who seemed mute also, pulled the reins slightly, with a simple little: “Ho!--” discreet as a lugubrious signal which one hesitates to give--and the carriage was stopped.