"You know very well why I am still sufficiently a child to tremble before you, Marianne," murmured Jose. "At my age, it is folly; but I am as superstitious as gamblers--or sailors, those other gamblers, who stake their lives, and I have never met you without feeling that I was about to suffer." "To suffer from what?" "To suffer through you," said the duke. "Do you know that if I had never met you, it is probable that I should never have seen all those countries of which I spoke just now, and that I should have been married long ago, at Madrid or at Toledo?" "And I prevented you?--" Rosas interrupted Marianne, saying abruptly, and smiling almost sadly: "Ah! my dear one, if you only knew--you have prevented many things." "If I have prevented you from being unhappy, I am delighted. Besides, it is evident that you have never had a very determined inclination for marriage, seeing that you have preferred to trot around the world." "Like Don Quixote, eh? Do you know, moreover, since we are talking of all these things, that you have saved me from dying in the corner like an abandoned dog?" "I?" said Marianne. "You or your songs, as you please. Yes, in Egypt I suffered from fever something like typhus. They left me for dead, as after a battle, in the most wretched and frightful of native villages. No doctors, who might, perhaps, have cured me, not a bed, not even a mattress. My servants, believing me past hope, abandoned me--or rather, for I prefer your Parisian word--cast me adrift--there is no other expression. There I was, stretched out on a heap of damp straw--in short, on a dunghill--" "You, Rosas?" "In all conscience, I correctly portrayed Job there; lean, with a three months' old beard, and with the death-rattle in my throat; in the open air--don't alarm yourself, the nights were warm. In the evening the fellah-women gathered round me, while I watched the sun that tinted their cheeks with bronze--there were some pretty ones among them, I have painted them in water-colors from memory--they poured out their insults upon me in guttural tones, which I unfortunately understood, as I am an Orientalist,"--he smiled--"and in addition to those insults they threw mud at me, a fetid mass of filth. The women were charming, although they took part in it. These people did not like the _roumi_, the shivering Christian. Besides, women do not like men who have fallen. They do not like feeble creatures.--" "Bah!--and where were the hospitals, the Sisters of Charity?"