Suddenly he felt all his weakness, all his misery, while his blood continued crimsoning the little lakes among the rocks.  Closing his eyes to die, he saw in the darkness a pale face, hands that were deftly weaving delicate laces, and before night should descend forever upon his eyelids, he moaned a childish cry: 

“Mama!... Mama!...”

Three months afterward upon arriving at Barcelona, he found his mother just as he had seen her during his death-agony on the Portuguese coast....  Some fishermen had picked him up just as his life was ebbing away.  During his stay in the hospital he wrote many times in a light and confident tone to Dona Cristina, pretending that he was detained by important business in Lisbon.

Upon seeing him enter his home, the good lady dropped her eternal lace-work, turned pale and greeted him with tremulous hands and troubled eyes.  She must have known the truth; and if she did not know it, her motherly instinct told her when she saw Ulysses convalescent, emaciated, hovering between courageous effort and physical breakdown, just like the brave who come out of the torture chamber.

“Oh, my son!...  How much longer!...”

It was time that he should bring to an end his madness for adventure, his crazy desire for attempting the impossible, and encountering the most absurd dangers.  If he wished to follow the sea, very well.  But let it be in respectable vessels in the service of a great company, following a career of regular promotion, and not wandering capriciously over all seas, associated with the international lawlessness that the ports offer for the reinforcement of crews.  Remaining quietly at home would be best of all.  Oh, what happiness if he would but stay with his mother!...

And Ulysses, to the astonishment of Dona Cristina, decided to do so.  The good senora was not alone.  A niece was living with her as though she were her daughter.  The sailor had only to go down in the depths of his memory to recall a little tot of a girl four years old, creeping and frolicking on the shore while he, with the gravity of a man, had been listening to the old secretary of the town, as he related the past grandeurs of the Catalunian navy.

She was the daughter of a Blanes (the only poor one in the family) who had commanded his relatives’ ships, and had died of yellow fever in a Central American port.  Ferragut had difficulty in reconciling the little creature crawling over the sand with this same slender, olive-colored girl wearing her mass of hair like a helmet of ebony, with two little spirals escaping over the ears.  Her eyes appeared to have the changing tints of the sea, sometimes black and others blue, or green and deep where the light of the sun was reflected like a point of gold.

He was attracted by her simplicity and by the timid grace of her words and smile.  She was an irresistible novelty for this world-rover who had only known coppery maidens with bestial roars of laughter, yellowish Asiatics with feline gestures, or Europeans from the great ports who, at the first words, beg for drink, and sing upon the knees of the one who is treating, wearing his cap as a testimony of love.