Outside the house, Ulysses would breathe in the twilight breeze and look at the first stars that were beginning to sparkle above the roofs.  He felt the fresh delight and trembling limbs of the odalisque coming out of retreat.

The dinner finished, they would stroll through the darkest street or the promenades along the shore, avoiding the people.  One night they stopped in the gardens of the Villa Nazionale, near the bench that had witnessed their struggle when returning from Posilipo.

“You wished to kill me, you little rascal!...  You threatened me with your revolver, my bandit!...”

Ulysses protested.  What a way to remember things!  But she refuted his correction with a bold and lying authority.

“It was you!...  It way you!  I say so, and that is enough.  You must become accustomed to accepting whatever I may affirm.”

In the beer garden, where they used to dine almost every night—­an imitation medieval saloon, with paneled beams made by machinery, plaster walls imitating oak, and neo-Gothic crystals—­the proprietor used to exhibit as a great curiosity a jar of grotesque little figures among the porcelain steins that adorned the brackets of the pedestals.

Ferragut recognized it immediately; it was an ancient Peruvian jar.

“Yes, it is a huaca,” she said.  “I have been in that, too....  We were engaged in manufacturing antiques.”

Freya misunderstood the gesture that her lover made.  She thought that he was astonished at the audacity of this manufacture of souvenirs.  “Germany is great; nothing can resist the adaptive powers of her industries....”

And her eyes burned with a proud light as she enumerated these exploits of false historical resurrection.  They had filled museums and private collections with Egyptian and Phoenician statuettes recently reproduced.  Then, on German soil, they had manufactured Peruvian antiquities in order to sell them to the tourists who visit the ancient realm of the Incas.  Some of the inhabitants received wages for disinterring these things opportunely with a great deal of publicity.  Now the fad of the moment was the black art, and collectors were hunting horrible wooden idols carved by tribes in the interior of Africa.

But what had really impressed Ferragut was the plural which she had employed in speaking of such industries.  Who had fabricated these Peruvian antiquities?...  Was it her husband, the sage?...

“No,” replied Freya tranquilly.  “It was another one—­an artist from Munich.  He had hardly any talent for painting, but great intelligence in business matters.  We returned from Peru with the mummy of an Inca which we exhibited in almost all the museums of Europe without finding a purchaser.  Bad business!  We had to keep the Inca in our room in the hotel, and ...”

Ferragut was not interested in the wanderings of the poor Indian monarch, snatched from the repose of his tomb....  One more!  Each of Freya’s confidences evoked a new predecessor from the haze of her past.