He hesitated however. This evening he felt too unhappy and too weak. From now to the first of October, would he not have the time to return? A step came from the garden side. Jean looked again at the thin blade of light which escaped from the room where Odile was sitting, and cut the night in two; and he withdrew. CHAPTER XIV THE LAST EVENING The last evening had come. Jean was to take at Obernai a night train for Strasburg, so as to be in the barracks of St. Nicholas the next morning at seven o'clock, the regulation hour. His uniform, ordered of a Strasburg tailor, as was usual for the one-year service men, was waiting for him, blue and yellow, folded on two chairs, in the room which a month ago Madame Oberlé had taken, facing the barracks of St. Nicholas, about the middle of the rue des Balayeurs. After dinner he said to his mother: "Let me go out alone, so that I can say good-bye to the Alsheim country I shall not see again for a long time." She smiled. M. Joseph Oberlé answered: "My dear fellow, you will not see me again; I have bills falling due to-morrow, and I must work in my office. And besides, I do not care about useless sentiment. Well, perhaps you will not find it easy to get leave before two months. I dare say not, but that will only make you the better pleased to come home. Come! Good-bye." More affectionately than he would have believed it possible he embraced him, and with a word from Lucienne in her clear, young voice, "Soon," he went out. The night air was laden with moisture to a remarkable degree: not a cloud. A crescent moon, stars in thousands; but between heaven and earth a veil of mist was spread which allowed the light to penetrate, but dispersed it in such a manner that there was no object really in shadow, and none which showed brightly. Everything was bathed in a pearly atmosphere. It was warm to breathe. "How sweet my Alsace is!" said Jean, when he had opened the door of the kitchen garden, and found himself behind the village houses, facing the plain, on which the moonlight was sleeping, blotted here and there with the shadows of an apple-tree or a walnut. An immense languor escaped from the soil, into which the first rains of autumn had sunk. The perfumes of stubble and ploughed land mixed with the odours from all kinds of vegetation come to their fullness of growth and aroma. The mountain was sending out gently to the valley the odour of pine pollen on the breeze, and the mint and the dying strawberries and bilberries, and its juniper berries crushed by the feet of passers-by and flocks. Jean breathed in the odour of Alsace; he thought he could recognise the exquisite perfume of that little mountain which is near Colmar, called Florimont, where the dittany grows, and he thought, "It is the last time. Never again! Never again!"