At night as he lay in his bed in his tent, Tremont and Hammet Abou cooled his temples with water from the earthen bottles, where the sweet ooze stood out humid and refreshing on the damp clay. They gave him acid and cooling drinks, and now and then Sabron would smile on Tremont, calling him "_petit frère_", and Tremont heard the words with moisture in his eyes, remembering what he had said to the Marquise d'Esclignac about being Sabron's brother. Once or twice the soldier murmured a woman's name, but Tremont could not catch it, and once he said to the duke: "Sing! Sing!" The Frenchman obeyed docilely, humming in an agreeable barytone the snatches of song he could remember, La Fille de Madame Angot_, Il Trovatore_; running then into more modern opera, _La Veuve Joyeuse_. But the lines creased in Sabron's forehead indicated that the singer had not yet found the music which haunted the memory of the sick man. "Sing!" he would repeat, fixing his hollow eyes on his companion, and Tremont complied faithfully. Finally, his own thoughts going back to early days, he hummed tunes that he and a certain little girl had sung at their games in the _allées_ of an old château in the valley of the Indre. "_Sonnez les matines Ding--din--don,_" and other children's melodies. In those nights, on that desolate way, alone, in a traveling tent, at the side of a man he scarcely knew, Robert de Tremont learned serious lessons. He had been a soldier himself, but his life had been an inconsequent one. He had lived as he liked, behind him always the bitterness of an early deception. But he had been too young to break his heart at seventeen. He had lived through much since the day his father exiled him to Africa. Thérèse had become a dream, a memory around which he did not always let his thoughts linger. When he had seen her again after her husband's death and found her free, he was already absorbed in the worldly life of an ambitious young man. He had not known how much he loved her until in the Villa des Bougainvilleas he had seen and contrasted her with Julia Redmond. All the charm for him of the past returned, and he realized that, as money goes, he was poor--she was poorer. The difficulties of the marriage made him all the more secure in his determination that nothing should separate him again from this woman. By Sabron's bed he hummed his little insignificant tunes, and his heart longed for the woman. When once or twice on the return journey they had been threatened by the engulfing sand-storm, he had prayed not to die before he could again clasp her in his arms.