I was struck now by the flushed weariness of his face, and the look of age the grey stubble on his unshaved chin gave him. He sat crumpled up, shivering and coughing, munching reluctantly, but drinking eagerly, and whimpering a little, a dreadfully pitiful figure to me. But we had to go through with it; there was no way out for us. Presently the sun rose over the pines, and the sand grew rapidly warm. My uncle had done eating, and sat with his wrists resting on his knees, the most hopeless looking of lost souls. “I’m ill,” he said, “I’m damnably ill! I can feel it in my skin!” Then—it was horrible to me—he cried, “I ought to be in bed; I ought to be in bed... instead of flying about,” and suddenly he burst into tears. I stood up. “Go to sleep, man!” I said, and took the rug from him, and spread it out and rolled him up in it. “It’s all very well,” he protested; “I’m not young enough—” “Lift up your head,” I interrupted, and put his knapsack under it. “They’ll catch us here, just as much as in an inn,” he grumbled and then lay still. Presently, after a long time, I perceived he was asleep. His breath came with peculiar wheezings, and every now and again he would cough. I was very stiff and tired myself, and perhaps I dozed. I don’t remember. I remember only sitting, as it seemed, nigh interminably, beside him, too weary even to think in that sandy desolation. No one came near us; no creature, not even a dog. I roused myself at last, feeling that it was vain to seek to seem other than abnormal, and with an effort that was like lifting a sky of lead, we made our way through the wearisome sand to a farmhouse. There I feigned even a more insufficient French than I possess naturally, and let it appear that we were pedestrians from Biarritz who had lost our way along the shore and got benighted. This explained us pretty well, I thought, and we got most heartening coffee and a cart to a little roadside station. My uncle grew more and more manifestly ill with every stage of our journey. I got him to Bayonne, where he refused at first to eat, and was afterwards very sick, and then took him shivering and collapsed up a little branch line to a frontier place called Luzon Gare.