delity, now issued from her mouth in one interminable complaint.

"From our home my thoughts have followed you in all your voyages,
although I knew your forgetfulness and your infidelity. All the papers
found in your pockets, and photographs lost among your books, the
allusions of your comrades, your smiles of pride, the satisfied air
with which you many times returned, the series of new manners and
additional care of your person that you did not have when you left,
told me all.... I also suspected in your bold caresses the hidden
presence of other women who lived far away on the other side of the
world."

She stopped her turbulent language for a few moments, letting the blush
which her memories evoked fade away.

"I loathed it all," she continued. "I know the men of the sea; I am a
sailor's daughter. Many times I saw my mother weeping and pitied her
simplicity. There is no use weeping for what men do in distant lands.
It is always bitter enough for a woman who loves her husband, but it
has no bad consequences and must be pardoned.... But now.... _Now_!..."

The wife became irritated on recalling his recent infidelities.... Her
rivals were not the public women of the great ports, nor the tourists
who could give only a few days of love, like an alms which they tossed
without stopping their progress. Now he had become enamored with the
enthusiasm of a husky boy with an elegant and handsome dame, with a
foreign woman who had made him forget his business, abandon his ship,
and remain away, as though renouncing his family forever.... And poor
Esteban, orphaned by his father's forgetfulness, had gone in search of
him, with the adventurous impetuosity inherited from his ancestors: and
death, a horrible death, had come to meet him on the road.

Something more than the grief of the outraged wife vibrated in Cinta's
laments. It was the rivalry with that woman of Naples, whom she
believed a great lady with all the attractions of wealth and high
birth. She envied her superior weapons of seduction; she raged at her
own modesty and humility as a home-keeping woman.

"I was resolved to ignore it all," she continued. "I had one
consolation,--my son. What did it matter to me what you did?... You
were far off, and my son was living at my side.... And now I shall
never see him again!... My fate is to live eternally alone. You know
very well that I shall not be a mother again,--that I cannot give you
another son.... And it was you, y