"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.