“Ah!... Tal!...” he roared, hurling upon her the worst of feminine insults.

And he fell upon her again as though he were a man, uniting to his original purpose the desire of maltreating her, of degrading her, of making her his.

Freya awaited him firmly...  Seeing the icy glitter of her eyes, Ulysses without knowing why recalled the “eye of the morning,” the companionable reptile of her dances.

In this furious onslaught he was stopped by the simple contact on his forehead of a diminutive metal circle, a kind of frozen thimble that was resting on his skin.

He looked...  It was a little revolver, a deadly toy of shining nickel.  It had appeared in Freya’s hand, drawn secretly from her clothes, or perhaps from that gold-mesh bag whose contents seemed inexhaustible.

She was looking at him fixedly with her finger on the trigger.  He surmised her familiarity with the weapon that she had in her hand.  It could not be the first time that she had had recourse to it.

The sailor’s indecision was brief.  With a man, he would have taken possession of the threatening hand, twisting it until he broke it, without the slightest fear of the revolver.  But he had opposite him a woman ... and this woman was entirely capable of wounding him, and at the same time placing him in a ridiculous situation.

“Retire, sir!” ordered Freya with a ceremonious and threatening tone as though she were speaking to an utter stranger.

But it was she who retired finally, seeing that Ulysses stepped back, thoughtful and confused.  She turned her back on him at the same time that the revolver disappeared from her hand.

Before departing, she murmured some words that Ferragut was not able to understand, looking at him for the last time with contemptuous eyes.  They must be terrible insults, and just because she was uttering them in a mysterious language, he felt her scorn more deeply.

“It cannot be....  It is all ended.  It is ended forever!...”

She said this repeatedly before returning to her hotel.  And he thought of it during all the wakeful night between agonizing attacks of nightmare.  When the morning was well advanced the bugles of the bersaglieri awakened him from a heavy sleep.

He paid his bill in the manager’s office and gave a last tip to the porter, telling him that a few hours later a man from the ship would come for his baggage.

He was happy, with the forced happiness of one obliged to accommodate himself to circumstances.  He congratulated himself upon his liberty as though he had gained this liberty of his own free will and it had not been imposed upon him by her scorn.  Since the memory of the preceding day pained him, putting him in a ridiculous and gross light, it was better not to recall the past.

He stopped in the street to take a last look at the hotel.  “Adieu, accursed albergo!...  Never will I see you again.  Would that you might burn down with all your occupants!”