She stopped her turbulent language for a few moments, letting the blush which her memories evoked fade away.

“I loathed it all,” she continued.  “I know the men of the sea; I am a sailor’s daughter.  Many times I saw my mother weeping and pitied her simplicity.  There is no use weeping for what men do in distant lands.  It is always bitter enough for a woman who loves her husband, but it has no bad consequences and must be pardoned....  But now.... Now!...”

The wife became irritated on recalling his recent infidelities....  Her rivals were not the public women of the great ports, nor the tourists who could give only a few days of love, like an alms which they tossed without stopping their progress.  Now he had become enamored with the enthusiasm of a husky boy with an elegant and handsome dame, with a foreign woman who had made him forget his business, abandon his ship, and remain away, as though renouncing his family forever....  And poor Esteban, orphaned by his father’s forgetfulness, had gone in search of him, with the adventurous impetuosity inherited from his ancestors:  and death, a horrible death, had come to meet him on the road.

Something more than the grief of the outraged wife vibrated in Cinta’s laments.  It was the rivalry with that woman of Naples, whom she believed a great lady with all the attractions of wealth and high birth.  She envied her superior weapons of seduction; she raged at her own modesty and humility as a home-keeping woman.

“I was resolved to ignore it all,” she continued.  “I had one consolation,—­my son.  What did it matter to me what you did?...  You were far off, and my son was living at my side....  And now I shall never see him again!...  My fate is to live eternally alone.  You know very well that I shall not be a mother again,—­that I cannot give you another son....  And it was you, you! who have robbed me of the only thing that I had!...”

Her imagination invented the most improbable reasons for explaining to herself this unjust loss.

“God wished to punish you for your bad life and has therefore killed Esteban, and is slowly killing me....  When I learned of his death I wished to throw myself off the balcony.  I am still living because I am a Christian, but what an existence awaits me!  What a life for you if you are really a father!...  Think that your son might still be existing if you had not remained in Naples.”

Ferragut was a pitiful object.  He hung his head without strength to repeat the confused and lying protests with which he had received his wife’s first words.

“If she knew all the truth!” the voice of remorse kept saying in his brain.

He was thinking with horror of what Cinta could say if she knew the magnitude of his sin.  Fortunately she was ignorant of the fact that he had been of assistance to the assassins of their son....  And the conviction that she never would know it made him admit her words with silent humility,—­the humility of the criminal who hears himself accused of an offense by a judge ignorant of a still greater offense.