Toni opened his eyes with a gesture of surprise.  He wished to respond, but stood with his mouth open, not venturing to speak a single word....  This was his captain, and he was not going to permit any objections to his orders.

“Very well,” he said finally.  “I only ask you that you return as soon as possible to take up your command....  Do not forget what we are losing while the boat is tied up.”

A few days after the departure of the steamer Ulysses radically changed his method of living.

Freya no longer wished to continue lodging in the hotel.  Attacked by a sudden modesty, the curiosity and smiles of the tourists and servants were annoying her.  Besides, she wished to enjoy complete liberty in her love affairs.  Her friend, who was like a mother to her, would facilitate her desire.  The two would live in her house.

Ferragut was greatly surprised to discover the extreme size of the apartment occupied by the doctor.  Beyond her salon there was an endless number of rooms, somewhat dismantled and without furniture, a labyrinth of partitioned walls and passageways, in which the captain was always getting lost, and having to appeal to Freya for aid; all the doors of the stair-landings that appeared unrelated to the green screen of the office were so many other exits from the same dwelling.

The lovers were lodged in the extreme end, as though living in a separate house.  One of the doors was for them only.  They occupied a grand salon, rich in moldings and gildings and poor in furniture.  Three armchairs, an old divan, a table littered with papers, toilet articles and eatables, and a rather narrow couch in one of the corners, were all the conveniences of this new establishment.

In the street it was hot, and yet they were shivering with cold in this magnificent room into which the sun’s rays had never penetrated.  Ulysses attempted to make a fire on a hearth of colored marble, big as a monument, but he had to desist half-suffocated by the smoke.  In order to reach the doctor’s apartment they had to pass through a row of numberless connecting rooms, long since abandoned.

They lived as newly-wed people, in an amorous solitude, commenting with childish hilarity on the defects of their quarters and the thousand little inconveniences of material existence.  Freya would prepare breakfast on a small alcohol stove, defending herself from her lover, who believed himself more skilled than she in culinary affairs.  A sailor knows something of everything.

The mere suggestion of hunting a servant for their most common needs irritated the German maiden.

“Never!...  Perhaps she might be a spy!”

And the word “spy” on her lips took on an expression of immense scorn.

The doctor was absent on frequent trips and Karl the employee in the study, was the one who received visitors.  Sometimes he would pass through the row of deserted rooms in order to ask some information of Freya, and she would follow him out, deserting her lover for a few moments.