her casket.

After that she kept on ransacking the perfumed jewel-box for all the
gems that were her great pride,--earrings and finger-rings of great
price, mixed with other exotic jewels of bizarre form and slight value,
picked up on her voyages.

"Look carefully at this," she said gravely to Ferragut, while she
rubbed against her bare arm an enormous diamond in one of her rings.

Warmed by the friction, the precious stone became converted into a
magnet. A bit of paper placed a few inches away was attracted to it
with an irresistible fluttering.

She then rubbed one of the barbaric imitation-jewels of thick cut
glass, and the scrap of paper remained motionless without the slightest
evidence of attraction.

Satisfied with these experiments, she replaced her treasures in the
casket and set herself to beguiling the passing monotony, again
devoting herself to Ulysses.

These long imprisonments in an atmosphere charged with perfumes,
Oriental tobaccos, and feminine seduction were gradually disordering
Ferragut's mind. Besides this, he was drinking heavily in order to give
new vigor to his organism which was beginning to break down under the
excesses of his voluptuous seclusion. At the slightest sign of
weariness, Freya would fall upon him with her dominating lips. If she
freed herself from his embraces, it was to offer him a glass full of
the strongest liquor.

When the spell of intoxication overcame him, weighing down his eyes, he
always recalled the same dream. In his maudlin siestas, satiated and
happy, there would always reappear another Freya who was not Freya, but
Dona Constanza, the Empress of Byzantium. He could see her dressed as a
peasant girl, just as she was portrayed in the picture in the church of
Valencia, and at the same time completely undressed, like the other
houri, who was dancing in the salon.

This double image, which disappeared and reappeared capriciously with
the arbitrariness of dreams, was always telling him the same thing.
Freya was Dona Constanza perpetuated across the centuries, taking on a
new form. She was born of the union of a German and an Italian, just
like this other one.... But the chaste empress was now smiling in her
nudeness, satisfied with being simply Freya. Marital infidelity,
persecution and poverty had been the result of her first existence when
she was tranquil and virtuous.

"Now I know the truth," Dona Constanza would say with a sweetly
immodest smile. "Only love