On hearing these last words Ferragut jerked himself out of his sullen silence.  A malicious voice was chanting in his brain, “Now there are three!...”

“I saw him dying,” she continued, “on a bed of the hotel.  He had a red spot like a star on the bandage of his forehead,—­the hole of the pistol shot.  He died clutching my hands, swearing that he loved me and that he had killed himself for me ... a tiresome, horrible scene....  And nevertheless I am sure that he was deceiving himself, that he did not love me.  He killed himself through wounded vanity on seeing that I would have nothing to do with him,—­just for stubbornness, for theatrical effect, influenced by his readings....  He was a Roumanian tenor.  That was in Russia....  I have been an actress a part of my life....”

The sailor wished to express the astonishment that the different changes of this mysterious wandering existence, always showing a new facet, were producing in him; but he contained himself in order to listen better to the cruel counsels of the malignant voice speaking within his thoughts....  He was not trying to kill himself for her.  Quite the contrary!  His moody aggressiveness was considering her as the next victim.  There was in his eyes something of the dead Triton when in pursuit of a distant woman’s skirt on the coast.

Freya continued speaking.

“To kill one’s self is not a proof of love.  They all promise me the sacrifice of their existence from the very first words.  Men don’t know any other song.  Don’t imitate them, Captain.”

She remained pensive a long time.  Twilight was rapidly falling; half the sky was of amber and the other half of a midnight blue in which the first stars were beginning to twinkle.  The gulf was drowsing under the leaden coverlet of its water, exhaling a mysterious freshness that was spreading to the mountains and trees.  All the landscape appeared to be acquiring the fragility of crystal.  The silent air was trembling with exaggerated resonance, repeating the fall of an oar in the boats that, small as flies, were slipping along under the sky arching above the gulf, and prolonging the feminine and invisible voices passing through the groves on the heights.

The waiter went from table to table, distributing candles enclosed in paper shades.  The mosquitoes and moths, revived by the twilight, were buzzing around these red and yellow flowers of light.

Her voice was again sounding in the twilight air with the vagueness of one speaking in a dream.

“There is a sacrifice greater than that of life,—­the only one that can convince a woman that she is beloved.  What does life signify to a man like you?...  Your profession puts it in danger every day and I believe you capable of risking your life, when tired of land, for the slightest motive....”

She paused again and then continued.

“Honor is worth more than life for certain men,—­respectability, the preservation of the place that they occupy.  Only the man that would risk his honor and position for me, who would descend to the lowest depths without losing his will to live, would ever be able to convince me....  That indeed would be a sacrifice!”