l the employee in the
study, was the one who received visitors. Sometimes he would pass
through the row of deserted rooms in order to ask some information of
Freya, and she would follow him out, deserting her lover for a few
moments.

Left to himself, Ulysses would suddenly realize the dual nature of his
personality. Then the man he was before that meeting in Pompeii would
assert himself, and he would see his vessel and his home in Barcelona.

"What have you got yourself into?" he would ask himself remorsefully.
"How is all this affair ever going to turn out?..."

But at the sound of her footsteps in the next room, on perceiving the
atmospheric wave produced by the displacement of her adorable body,
this second person would fold itself back and a dark curtain would fall
over his memory, leaving visible only the actual reality.

With the beatific smile of an opium-smoker, he would accept the
impetuous caress of her lips, the entwining of her arms, strangling him
like marble boas.

"Ulysses, my master!... The moments that separate me from you weigh
upon me like centuries!"

He, on the other hand, had lost all notion of time. The days were all
confused in his mind, and he had to keep asking in order to realize
their passing. After a week passed in the doctor's home, he would
sometimes suppose that the sweet sequestration had been but forty-eight
hours long, at others that nearly a month had flitted by.

They went out very little. The mornings slipped away insensibly between
the late awakening and preparations for a breakfast made by themselves.
If it was necessary to go after some eatable forgotten the day before,
it was she who took charge of the expedition, wishing to keep him from
all contact with outside life.

The afternoons were afternoons of the harem, passed upon the divan or
stretched on the floor. In a low voice she would croon Oriental songs,
incomprehensible and mysterious. Suddenly she would spring up
impetuously like a spring that is unwound, like a serpent that uncoils
itself, and would begin to dance, almost without moving her feet,
waving her lithe limbs.... And he would smile with stupefied
infatuation, extending a right hand toward an Arabian tabaret, covered
with bottles.

Freya took even greater care of the supply of liquor than of things to
eat. The sailor was half-drunk, but with a drunkenness wisely tempered
that never went beyond the rose-colored period. But he was so happy!...

They d