exists; all the rest is illusion. Kiss me,
Ferragut!... I have returned to life in order to recompense you. You
gave me the first of your childish affection; you longed for me before
you became a man."

And her kiss was like that of the spy--an absorbing kiss throughout his
entire person, making him awake.... Upon opening his eyes he saw Freya
with her mouth close to his.

"Arise, my sea-wolf!... It is already night. We are going to dine."

Outside the house, Ulysses would breathe in the twilight breeze and
look at the first stars that were beginning to sparkle above the roofs.
He felt the fresh delight and trembling limbs of the odalisque coming
out of retreat.

The dinner finished, they would stroll through the darkest street or
the promenades along the shore, avoiding the people. One night they
stopped in the gardens of the _Villa Nazionale_, near the bench that
had witnessed their struggle when returning from Posilipo.

"You wished to kill me, you little rascal!... You threatened me with
your revolver, my bandit!..."

Ulysses protested. What a way to remember things! But she refuted his
correction with a bold and lying authority.

"It was you!... It way you! I say so, and that is enough. You must
become accustomed to accepting whatever I may affirm."

In the beer garden, where they used to dine almost every night--an
imitation medieval saloon, with paneled beams made by machinery,
plaster walls imitating oak, and neo-Gothic crystals--the proprietor
used to exhibit as a great curiosity a jar of grotesque little figures
among the porcelain steins that adorned the brackets of the pedestals.

Ferragut recognized it immediately; it was an ancient Peruvian jar.

"Yes, it is a _huaca_," she said. "I have been in that, too.... We were
engaged in manufacturing antiques."

Freya misunderstood the gesture that her lover made. She thought that
he was astonished at the audacity of this manufacture of souvenirs.
"Germany is great; nothing can resist the adaptive powers of her
industries...."

And her eyes burned with a proud light as she enumerated these exploits
of false historical resurrection. They had filled museums and private
collections with Egyptian and Phoenician statuettes recently
reproduced. Then, on German soil, they had manufactured Peruvian
antiquities in order to sell them to the tourists who visit the ancient
realm of the Incas. Some of the inhabitants received wages for
disinterring these things