Finally he gave it up.  Chiaja had many streets and he was wandering aimlessly, since the concierge of the hotel had not been able to give him any precise directions.  The signora Talberg was evidently bent on outwitting all his finesse, trying to keep from him the address of her friends.

The following morning the captain took up his usual watch in the promenade near the white Virgil.  It was all in vain.  After ten o’clock he again wandered into the Aquarium, animated by a vague hope.

“Perhaps she may come to-day....”

With the superstition of the enamored and all those who wait, he kept hunting certain places preferred by the widow, believing that in this way he would attract her from her distant preoccupation, obliging her to come to him.

The tanks of the molluscas had always been especially interesting to her.  He recalled that Freya had several times spoken to him of this section.

Among its aquatic cases she always preferred the one marked number fifteen, the exclusive dominion of the polypi (cuttlefish).  A vague presentiment warned him that something very important in his life was going to be unrolled in that particular spot.  Whenever Freya visited the Aquarium, it was to see these repulsive and gluttonous animals eat.  There was nothing to do but to await her before this cavern of horrors.

And while she was making her way thither, the captain had to amuse himself like any landlubber, contemplating the ferocious chase and laborious digestion of these monsters.

He had seen them much larger in the deep-sea fishing grounds; but by curtailing his imaginative powers he could pretend that the blue sheet of the tank was the entire mass of the ocean—­the rough bits of stone on the bottom its submarine mountains, and by contracting his own personality, he could reduce himself to the same scale as the little victims that were falling under the devouring tentacles.  In this manner he could fancy of gigantic dimensions these cuttlefish of the Aquarium, just as the monstrous oceanic octopi must be that, thousands of yards down, were illuminating the gloom of the waters with the greenish star of their phosphorescent nuclei.

From prehistoric times the men of the sea had known this great, ropy beast of the abysses.  The geographers of antiquity used to speak of it, giving the measurement of its terrible arms.

Pliny used to recount the destruction accomplished by a gigantic octopus in the vivarium of the Mediterranean.  When some sailors succeeded in killing it they carried it to the epicure, Lucullus,—­the head as big as a barrel, and some of its tentacles so huge that one person could hardly reach around them.  The chroniclers of the Middle Ages had also spoken of the gigantic cuttlefish that on more than one occasion had, with its serpentine arms, snatched men from the decks of the ships.