Jean experienced great pleasure from this solitary, stiff climb. As he went up he thought of Odile more and more, and he was more and more glad that he had chosen this holy place of Alsace in which to meet her--and this day--doubly affecting. Everywhere around him the beautiful scalefern which carpets the rocky slopes unfolded its velvet fronds. On all last year's shoots of honeysuckle there were little leaves; the first strawberries were in flower, and the first lilies of the valley. The geraniums, which are so fine in Sainte Odile, lifted their hairy stalks, and the multitude of whortle berries and bilberries and raspberries, that is the entire undergrowth, whole fields of it, began to pour out on the breeze the perfume of their moving sap. The fog retained these few scents and kept them in like a net work on the sides of the Vosges. Jean came close to Heidenbruch, looked at the green shutters and went on his way. "Uncle Ulrich," he murmured, "you would be glad if you saw me, and if you knew where I am going, and with whom, perhaps, I shall be presently!" Fidèle barked, half asleep, but did not come. The mountain was again deserted. A buzzard called above the mist. Jean, who had not been this way since his childhood, enjoyed the wildness and peacefulness of the place. He reached the higher part, which is the property of the bishopric of Strasburg, and followed the "pagan wall" which surrounds the summit for ten miles, that he might recall his school-boy impressions of long ago. At midday he had passed the Männelstein rock and entered the convent courtyard, built on the mountain top, a crown of old stone placed above the summit of the pine forests; and there, although there was no crowd, he found groups of pilgrims, carriages with horses unharnessed, fastened to the trunks of ancient lime-trees, grown no one knew how at this altitude, and covering with their branches nearly the whole enclosure. Jean remembered the way; he went towards the chapels on the right. He merely passed through the first, which is painted, but stopped in the second, with elliptical arches leading to the shrine, where lies the wax figure of the patroness of Alsace, the Abbess Sainte Odile--so gentle, with her pink face, her veil, and her golden crozier, her purple mantle lined with ermine. Jean knelt down: with all the strength of his faith he prayed for his home, so sadly divided against itself, from which he felt glad to be away, and that Odile Bastian should not fail to keep this love tryst, the hour for which was so near at hand. As his was a sincere soul, he added: "Let our way be made clear to us! May we follow it together! Let us see all obstacles removed from our path!" The whole of Alsace had knelt at the same spot for centuries.