lucked from the garden negligently and with which he had played
unconsciously the whole evening.

A phase of their life finished with that day: a lapse of time had
occurred, their childhood had passed--

Of recommendations, they had none very long to exchange, so intensely
was each one sure of what the other might do during the separation. They
had less to say to each other than other engaged people have, because
they knew mutually their most intimate thoughts. After the first hour
of conversation, they remained hand in hand in grave silence, while were
consumed the inexorable minutes of the end.

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