“I?” said Marianne.

“You or your songs, as you please.  Yes, in Egypt I suffered from fever something like typhus.  They left me for dead, as after a battle, in the most wretched and frightful of native villages.  No doctors, who might, perhaps, have cured me, not a bed, not even a mattress.  My servants, believing me past hope, abandoned me—­or rather, for I prefer your Parisian word—­cast me adrift—­there is no other expression.  There I was, stretched out on a heap of damp straw—­in short, on a dunghill—­”

“You, Rosas?”

“In all conscience, I correctly portrayed Job there; lean, with a three months’ old beard, and with the death-rattle in my throat; in the open air—­don’t alarm yourself, the nights were warm.  In the evening the fellah-women gathered round me, while I watched the sun that tinted their cheeks with bronze—­there were some pretty ones among them, I have painted them in water-colors from memory—­they poured out their insults upon me in guttural tones, which I unfortunately understood, as I am an Orientalist,”—­he smiled—­“and in addition to those insults they threw mud at me, a fetid mass of filth.  The women were charming, although they took part in it.  These people did not like the roumi, the shivering Christian.  Besides, women do not like men who have fallen.  They do not like feeble creatures.—­”

“Bah!—­and where were the hospitals, the Sisters of Charity?”

“Are you quite sure that the Sisters of Charity are women, my dear Marianne?—­In a word, I swear that I asked only one thing, as I lay on that devilish, poisonous dunghill, and that was, to end the matter in the quickest possible way, that I might be no longer thought of, when—­don’t know why, or, rather, I know very well—­in my fever, a certain voice reached me—­whence?—­from far away it commenced humming,—­I should proclaim it yours among a thousand—­a ridiculously absurd refrain that we heard together one evening at the Varietes, at an anniversary celebration.  And this Boulevard chant recurred to me there in the heart of that desert, and transported me at a single bound to Paris, and I saw you again and these fair locks that I now look at, I saw them, too, casting upon your forehead the light shadow that they do now.  I heard your laugh.  I actually felt that I had you beside me in one of the stage-boxes at the theatre, listening to the now forgotten singer humming the refrain that had so highly amused you, Guy and myself—­”

It seemed to Marianne that the duke hesitated for a moment before pronouncing Guy’s name.  It was an almost imperceptible hesitation, rather felt than seen.

Rosas quickly recovered: 

“On my word, you will see directly that the Boulevard lounger was hidden under your gloomy Castilian,—­that refrain took such a hold on my poor wandering brain, such an entire possession, that I clung to it when the fever was at its height—­I hummed it again and again, and on my honor, it banished the fever, perhaps by some homeopathic process, for at any other time, this deuced refrain would have aroused a fever in me.”