So he went on, and refused to give in. He valiantly accomplished the terrible marches, and bore the sleepless nights, and the days without rest. We sometimes found him sitting down panting, during the halts, without even the strength to wipe his forehead. His appearance then would terrify us, his hollow eyes, and flaming cheek-bones. In a few days his features had become peaked, his face emaciated; his poor shoulders were bowed. One would never have expected him to go down hill so rapidly. His cough was growing more rasping. He expectorated freely, but always--with touching consideration--into a little spittoon, concealed until then in his pack. We hardly dared to ask him how he was. He had asked me lightly not to refer to the subject again. "I am better, I assure you, since I've given up thinking about it!" "But what about your temperature?" "I'm not feverish now. I've thrown away my thermometer. I ought to have begun by doing that!" He did not let a day go by without writing, any more than I did. He was always on the lookout for ways of despatching his letters, and was usually obliging enough to allow me to profit by them. I was totally ignorant of anything concerning the object of his love, her name and age and everything. The one question he had pronounced had been enough to make me understand his devotion for her. She too, I guessed, must love him, if she was willing to wait till he recovered. I used to wonder about this girl--a stranger to me. I imagined her as the bearer of a great name, endowed with beauty and every fascination. What a couple they would make! Alas, and that would never be! Would she recognise her fiancé, when the war gave him back to her, battered, and at the end of his strength, destined to fade away? I pictured him on a long chair shivering and pulling his rug over his knees. The idea obsessed me. Like imaginations must harry him ceaselessly. With a vague eye, and a far-away look he must often be thinking of her, whom he would see again--if things were looked at in their best light--only for a moment. The closest intimacy had sprung up between him and Guillaumin and me.