He began by explaining that his professional duty had made him decide to defend this spy.  She was in need of a lawyer; she was a foreigner; public opinion, influenced by the exaggerated accounts given by the newspapers of her beauty and her jewels, was ferociously inimical, demanding her immediate punishment.  Nobody had wished to take charge of her defense.  And for this very reason he had accepted it without fear of unpopularity.

Ferragut believed that this sacrifice might be attributed to the impulse of a gallant old beau, attracted to Freya because of her beauty.  Besides, this criminal process represented a typical Parisian incident and might give a certain romantic notoriety to the one intervening in its developments.

A few paragraphs further on the sailor became convinced that the maitre had fallen in love with his client.  This woman even in her dying moments shed around her most amazing powers of seduction.  The professional success anticipated by the lawyer disappeared on his first questioning.  Defense of Freya would be impossible.  When he questioned her regarding the events of her former life, she either wept for every answer, or else remained silent, immovable, with as unconcerned a glance as though the fate of some other woman were at stake.

The military judges did not need her confessions:  they knew, detail for detail, all her existence during the war and in the last years of peace.  Never had the police agents abroad worked with such rapidity and success.  Mysterious and omnipotent good fortune had crowned every investigation.  They knew all of Freya’s doings.  They had even received from a secret agent exact data regarding her personality, the number by which she was represented in the director’s office at Berlin, the salary that she was paid, as well as her reports during the past month.  Documents written by her personally, of an irrefutable culpability, had poured in without any one’s knowing from what point they were sent or by whom.

Every time that the judge had placed before Freya’s eyes one of these proofs, she looked at her lawyer in desperation.

“It is they!” she moaned.  “They who desire my death!”

Her defender was of the same opinion.  The police had learned of her presence in France by a letter that her superiors in Barcelona had sent, stupidly disguised, written with regard to a code whose mystery had been discovered some time before by the French counter-spies.  To the maitre it was only too evident that some mysterious power had wished to rid itself of this woman, dispatching her to an enemy’s country, intending to send her to death.

Ulysses suspected in the defender a state of mind similar to his own,—­the same duality that had tormented him in all his relations with Freya.

“I, sir,” wrote the lawyer, “have suffered much.  One of my sons, an officer, died in the battle of the Aisne.  Others very close to me, nephews and pupils, died in Verdun and with the expeditionary army of the Orient....”