Sweet, tantalizing, exquisite with the sadness and the passion of young love, there came to him the memories of the moonlight nights on the terrace of the old château. He saw her in the pretty girlish dresses of long ago, the melancholy droop of her quivering mouth, her bare young arms, and smelled the fragrance of her hair as he kissed her. So humming his soothing melodies to the sick man, with his voice softened by his memories, he soothed Sabron.
Sabron closed his eyes, the creases in his forehead disappeared as though brushed away by a tender hand. Perhaps the sleep was due to the fact that, unconsciously, Tremont slipped into humming a tune which Miss Redmond had sung in the Villa des Bougainvilleas, and of whose English words De Tremont was quite ignorant.
"Will he last until Algiers, Hammet Abou?"
"What will be, will be, Monsieur!" Abou replied.
"He must," De Tremont answered fiercely. "He shall."
He became serious and meditative on those silent days, and his blue eyes, where the very whites were burned, began to wear the far-away mysterious look of the traveler across long distances. During the last sand-storm he stood, with the camels, round Sabron's litter, a human shade and shield, and when the storm ceased, he fell like one dead, and the Arabs pulled off his boots and put him to bed like a child.
One sundown, as they traveled into the after-glow with the East behind them, when Tremont thought he could not endure another day of the voyage, when the pallor and waxness of Sabron's face were like death itself, Hammet Abou, who rode ahead, cried out and pulled up his camel short. He waved his arm.
"A caravan, Monsieur!"
In the distance they saw the tents, like lotus leaves, scattered on the pink sands, and the dark shadows of the Arabs and the couchant beasts, and the glow of the encampment fire.
"An encampment, Monsieur!"