This is the first act of the opera, and it is all expository to Belasco's "Tragedy of Japan," which plays in one act, with the pathetic vigil separating the two days which form its period of action. When that, like the second act of the opera, opens, Pinkerton has been gone from Nagasaki and his "wife" three years, and a baby boy of whom he has never heard, but who has his eyes and hair has come to bear Butterfly company in the little house on the hill. The money left by the male butterfly when he flitted is all but exhausted. Madama Butterfly appears to be lamentably ignorant of the customs of her country, for she believes herself to be a wife in the American sense and is fearfully wroth with Suzuki, her maid, when she hints that she never knew a foreign husband to come back to a Japanese wife. But Pinkerton when he sailed away had said that he would be back "when the robins nest again," and that suffices Cio-Cio-San. But when Sharpless comes with a letter to break the news that his friend is coming back with an American wife, he loses courage to perform his mission at the contemplation of the little woman's faith in the truant. Does he know when the robins nest in America? In Japan they had nested three times since Pinkerton went away. The consul quails at that and damns his friend as a scoundrel. Now Goro, who knows Butterfly's pecuniary plight, brings Yamadori to her. Yamadori is a wealthy Japanese citizen of New York in the book and play and a prince in the opera, but in all he is smitten with Butterfly's beauty and wants to add her name to the list of wives he has conveniently married and as conveniently divorced on his visits to his native land. Butterfly insists that she is an American and cannot be divorced Japanese fashion, and is amazed when Sharpless hints that Pinkerton might have forgotten her and she would better accept Yamadori's hand. First she orders him out of the house, but, repenting her of her rudeness, brings in the child to show him something that no one is likely to forget. She asks the consul to write to his friend and tell him that he has a son, so fine a son, indeed, that she indulges in a day dream of the Mikado stopping at the head of his troops to admire him and make him a prince of the realm. Sharpless goes away with his mission unfulfilled and Suzuki comes in dragging Goro with her, for that he had been spreading scandalous tales about the treatment which children born like this child receive in America. Butterfly is tempted to kill the wretch, but at the last is content to spurn him with her foot.