They recognised him a long way off because of his slim, tall figure and his habit of wearing only light clothes, which he bought in Paris, and invariably chose in shades of brown, varying from the dark brown of the walnut to the light brown of the oak. His pointed beard, very well kept, added length to a face which had but little colour and few wrinkles; his mouth smiled readily under his moustaches, and his prominent nose, with its fine outline, showed purity of race; his kind, intelligent grey eyes would quickly become haughty and defiant if one spoke of Alsace; and the wide brow, which imparted a touch of dreaminess to this face of a fighting man, seemed larger still because of two bare patches extending into the thick growth of stiff short hairs.
Now, on this particular evening M. Ulrich had returned from visiting the wood-cutting going on in the mountains of the Valley of the Bruche, and his servants were not expecting him to go out again, when after dinner he said to his servant, the old Lisa, who was waiting at table:
"My nephew, Jean, arrives to-night at Alsheim, and no doubt if I waited till to-morrow I should see him here, but I prefer to see him down there, and to-night. So I am starting. Leave the key under the door, and go to bed."
He had immediately whistled for Fidèle, taken his stick and gone down the path, which entered the wood at some fifty paces below Heidenbruch. M. Ulrich was clad, according to his custom, in a loose coat and trousers of dead-leaf colour and a velvet shooting-cap. He walked quickly, and in less than half an hour he found himself at a place where the path joined a wider alley, made for pedestrians and for the pilgrims of Sainte Odile. The place was mentioned in the guide-books, because for a hundred yards one could look down on the course of a swift stream which lower down the plain flowed through the village of Alsheim; and especially because in an opening of the ravine in the angle formed by two slopes of the mountains, one could see, in daylight, a corner of Alsace--villages, fields, meadows--and very far away a vague streak of silver, which was the Rhine, and beyond that the mountains of the Black Forest--blue as flax and rounded as the loops of a garland. In spite of the night, which limited his vision, M. Ulrich, on arriving in the alley, looked in front of him, through force of habit, but saw only a triangle of steel-coloured darkness in the upper part of which real stars shone, and lower down gleamed luminous points the same size as the stars, lightly veiled and surrounded with a halo--the lamps and candles of the village of Alsheim. The traveller thought of his nephew, whom he was presently to embrace, and asked himself: "Whom am I going to find? What has he become after three years' absence, and three years in Germany?"