"I have a very pleasant recollection of you," continued Freya. "I guessed from the very first instant that our friendship was going to terminate as it has terminated."
She read a question in his glance.
"I know what you are going to say to me. You wonder that I have made you wait so long, that I should have made you suffer so with my caprices…. It was because while I was loving you, at the same time I wished to separate myself from you. You represented an attraction and a hindrance. I feared to mix you up in my affairs…. Besides, I need to be free in order to dedicate myself wholly to the fulfillment of my mission."
There was another long pause. Freya's eyes were fixed on those of her lover with scrutinizing tenacity. She wished to sound the depths of his thoughts, to study the ripeness of her preparation—before risking the decisive blow. Her examination was satisfactory.
"And now that you know me," she said with painful slowness, "begone!… You cannot love me. I am a spy, just as you say,—a contemptible being…. I know that you will not be able to continue loving me after what I have revealed to you. Take yourself away in your boat, like the heroes of the legends; we shall not see each other more. All our intercourse will have been a beautiful dream…. Leave me alone. I am ignorant of what my own fate may be, but what is more important to me is your tranquillity."
Her eyes filled with tears. She threw herself face downward on the divan, hiding her face in her arms, while a sobbing outburst set all the adorable curves of her back a-tremble.
Touched by her grief, Ulysses at the same time admired Freya's shrewdness in divining all his thoughts. The voice of good counsel,—that prudent voice that always spoke in one-half of his brain whenever the captain found himself in difficult situations,—had begun to cry out, scandalized at the first revelations made by this woman:
"Flee, Ferragut!… Flee! You are in a bad fix. Do not agree to any relations with such people. What have you to do with the country of this adventuress? Why should you encounter dangers for a cause that is of no importance to you? What you wanted of her, you already have gotten. Be an egoist, my son!"
But the voice in his other mental hemisphere, that boasting and idiotic voice which always impelled him to embark on vessels bound to be shipwrecked, to be reckless of danger for the mere pleasure of putting his vigor to the proof, also gave him counsel. It was a villainous thing to abandon a woman. Only a coward would do such a thing…. And this German woman appeared to love him so much!…
And with his ardent, meridional exuberance, he embraced her and lifted her up, patting the loosened ringlets on her forehead, petting her like a sick child, and drinking in her tears with interminable kisses.