d, and drooping her head, burst into desperate weeping, as
though the presence of her husband brought into higher relief the image
of her son whom she would never see again. Then she dried her tears,
and paler and sadder than ever, continued her habitual life.

Ferragut saw her as serene as a school-mistress, with her two little
nieces seated at her feet, keeping on with her eternal lace-work. She
forgot it only in order to attend to the care of her husband, occupying
herself with the very slightest details of his existence. That was her
duty. From childhood, she had known what are the obligations of the
wife of the captain of a ship when he stops at home for a few days,
like a bird of passage. But back of such attentions, Ulysses divined
the presence of an immovable obstacle. It was something enormous and
transparent that had interposed itself between the two. They saw each
other but without being able to touch each other. They were separated
by a distance, as hard and luminous as a diamond, that made every
attempt at drawing nearer together useless.

Cinta never smiled. Her eyes were dry, trying not to weep while her
husband was near her, but giving herself up freely to grief when she
was alone. Her duty was to make his existence bearable, hiding her
thoughts.

But this prudence of a good house-mistress was trampling under foot
their conjugal life of former times. One day Ferragut, with a return of
his old affection, and desiring to illuminate Cinta's twilight
existence with a pale ray of sunlight, ventured to caress her as in the
early days of their marriage. She drew herself up, modest and offended,
as though she had just received an insult. She escaped from his arms
with the energy of one who is repelling an outrage.

Ulysses looked upon a new woman, intensely pale, of an almost olive
countenance, the nose curved with wrath and a flash of madness in her
eyes. All that she was guarding in the depths of her thoughts came
forth, boiling over, expelled in a hoarse voice charged with tears.

"No, no!... We shall live together, because you are my husband and God
commands that it shall be so; but I no longer love you: I cannot love
you.... The wrong that you have done me!... I who loved you so much!...
However much you may hunt in your voyages and in your wicked
adventures, you will never find a woman that loves you as your wife has
loved you."

Her past of modest and submissive affection, of supine and tolerant
fi