last man left standing at Zinderneuf) they desert and experience a long trek during which Digby is killed in a skirmish with Arabs. After becoming separated from his friends Hank and Buddy in the desert, John returns to Brandon Abbas. The last survivor of the three brothers, he is welcomed by their aunt and his fiancée Isobel. In a letter from Beau delivered by John to Aunt Patricia, the reason for the jewel theft is revealed to have been to prevent Aunt Patricia's exposure for having secretly sold the jewel to enable her to extend relief to Sir Hector's exploited tenants. In Beau Ideal and other sequels P. C. Wren ties loose strings together, including recording that Michael Geste's original reasons for joining the Foreign Legion were not only honour but also his doomed and impossible love for Claudia. The French officer of Spahis Major de Beaujolais, who commands the relief column at Fort Zinderneuf, is the narrator of Wren's subsequent novel Beau Sabreur. Title The phrase "beau geste" () is from the French, meaning "a gracious (or fine) gesture". However, several references in the novel allude to the fact that the name can be taken to mean 'joke', or 'humorous remark' suggest that it is pronounced like English 'jest'. In French, the phrase includes the suggestion of a fine gesture with unwelcome or futile consequences, and an allusion to the chanson de geste, a literary poem celebrating the legendary deeds of a hero. Sequels P. C. Wren wrote the sequels Beau Sabreur (1926) (in which the narrator is a French officer of Spahis who plays a secondary role in Beau Geste) and Beau Ideal (1927). In this third volume Wren details what happened the night of the theft of the Blue Water. He also wrote Good Gestes, a collection of short tales (about half of them about the Geste brothers and their American friends Hank and Buddy, who also feature prominently in Beau Sabreur and Beau Ideal) and Spanish Maine (UK) (The Desert Heritage (US)), where loose ends are tied up and the successive tales of John Geste's adventures come to an end. Life in the Foreign Legion is also represented in some, but not all, of Wren's subsequent novels: Port O'Missing Men, Soldiers of Misfortune, Valiant Dust, Dead Men's Boots, Flawed Blades (which includes also two short tales of the Geste brothers in the Legion pre-Zinderneuf), The Wages