--"Italiano? No!" said Feliu, shaking his head.... One of his
luggermen, Gioachino Sparicio, who, though a Sicilian, could
speak several Italian idioms besides his own, had already
essayed.

--"She speaks something or other," answered the captain--"but no
English. I couldn't make her understand me; and Feliu, who talks
nearly all the infernal languages spoken down this way, says he
can't make her understand him. Suppose some of you who know
French talk to her a bit ... Laroussel, why don't you try?"

The young man addressed did not at first seem to notice the
captain's suggestion. He was a tall, lithe fellow, with a dark,
positive face: he had never removed his black gaze from the
child since the moment of her appearance. Her eyes, too, seemed
to be all for him--to return his scrutiny with a sort of vague
pleasure, a half savage confidence ... Was it the first embryonic
feeling of race-affinity quickening in the little brain?--some
intuitive, inexplicable sense of kindred? She shrank from Doctor
Hecker, who addressed her in German, shook her head at Lawyer
Solari, who tried to make her answer in Italian; and her look
always went back plaintively to the dark, sinister face of
Laroussel,--Laroussel who had calmly taken a human life, a wicked
human life, only the evening before.

--"Laroussel, you're the only Creole in this crowd," said the
captain; "talk to her! Talk gumbo to her! ... I've no doubt this
child knows German very well, and Italian too,"--he added,
maliciously--"but not in the way you gentlemen pronounce it!"