man could long exist, however, without food or drink, and Sabron was growing momentarily weaker. 

 The Frenchman, though a philosopher, realized how hard it was to die unsatisfied in love, unsatisfied in life, having accomplished nothing, having wished many things and realized at an early age only death! Then this point of view changed and the physical man was uppermost. 

 He groaned for water, he groaned for relief from pain, turned his head from side to side, and Pitchouné whined softly. Sabron was not strong enough to speak to him, and their voices, of man and beast, inarticulate, mingled—both left to die in the open. 

 Then Sabron violently rebelled and cried out in his soul against fate and destiny. He could have cursed the day he was born. Keenly desirous to live, to make his mark and to win everything a man values, why should he be picked and chosen for this lonely pathetic end? Moreover, he did not wish to suffer like this, to lose his grasp on life, to go on into wilder delirium and to die! He knew enough of injuries to feel sure that his wound alone could not kill him. When he had first dragged himself into the shade he had fainted, and when he came to himself he might have stanched his blood. His wound was hardly bleeding now. It had already died! Fatigue and thirst, fever would finish him, not his hurt. He was too young to die. 

 With great effort he raised himself on his arm and scanned the desert stretching on all sides like a rosy sea. Along the river bank the pale and delicate blossom and leaf of the mimosa lay like a bluish veil, and the smell of the evening and the smell of the mimosa flower and the perfumes of the weeds came to him, aromatic and sweet. Above his head the blue sky was ablaze with stars and directly over him the evening star hung like a crystal lamp. But there was no beauty in it for the wounded officer who looked in vain to the dark shadows on the desert that might mean approaching human life. It would be better to die as he was dying, than to be found by the enemy! 

 The sea of waste rolled unbroken as far as his fading eyes could reach. He sank back with a sigh, not to rise again, and closed his eyes and waited. He slept a short, restless, feverish sleep, and in it dreams chased one another like those evoked by a narcotic, but out of them, over and over again came the picture of Julia Redmond, and she sang to him the song whose words were a prayer for the safety of a loved one during the night. 

 From that romantic melody 

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