After that she kept on ransacking the perfumed jewel-box for all the gems that were her great pride,—­earrings and finger-rings of great price, mixed with other exotic jewels of bizarre form and slight value, picked up on her voyages.

“Look carefully at this,” she said gravely to Ferragut, while she rubbed against her bare arm an enormous diamond in one of her rings.

Warmed by the friction, the precious stone became converted into a magnet.  A bit of paper placed a few inches away was attracted to it with an irresistible fluttering.

She then rubbed one of the barbaric imitation-jewels of thick cut glass, and the scrap of paper remained motionless without the slightest evidence of attraction.

Satisfied with these experiments, she replaced her treasures in the casket and set herself to beguiling the passing monotony, again devoting herself to Ulysses.

These long imprisonments in an atmosphere charged with perfumes, Oriental tobaccos, and feminine seduction were gradually disordering Ferragut’s mind.  Besides this, he was drinking heavily in order to give new vigor to his organism which was beginning to break down under the excesses of his voluptuous seclusion.  At the slightest sign of weariness, Freya would fall upon him with her dominating lips.  If she freed herself from his embraces, it was to offer him a glass full of the strongest liquor.

When the spell of intoxication overcame him, weighing down his eyes, he always recalled the same dream.  In his maudlin siestas, satiated and happy, there would always reappear another Freya who was not Freya, but Dona Constanza, the Empress of Byzantium.  He could see her dressed as a peasant girl, just as she was portrayed in the picture in the church of Valencia, and at the same time completely undressed, like the other houri, who was dancing in the salon.

This double image, which disappeared and reappeared capriciously with the arbitrariness of dreams, was always telling him the same thing.  Freya was Dona Constanza perpetuated across the centuries, taking on a new form.  She was born of the union of a German and an Italian, just like this other one....  But the chaste empress was now smiling in her nudeness, satisfied with being simply Freya.  Marital infidelity, persecution and poverty had been the result of her first existence when she was tranquil and virtuous.

“Now I know the truth,” Dona Constanza would say with a sweetly immodest smile.  “Only love exists; all the rest is illusion.  Kiss me, Ferragut!...  I have returned to life in order to recompense you.  You gave me the first of your childish affection; you longed for me before you became a man.”

And her kiss was like that of the spy—­an absorbing kiss throughout his entire person, making him awake....  Upon opening his eyes he saw Freya with her mouth close to his.

“Arise, my sea-wolf!...  It is already night.  We are going to dine.”