There had just climbed aboard a poor Italian woman carrying a baby in her arms.
"_Figlia mia_!...

_Mia figlia_!..." she was wailing with disheveled hair and eyes swollen by weeping.
In the moment of the shipwreck she had lost a little girl, eight years old, and upon finding herself in the French steamer, she went instinctively toward the prow in search of the same spot which she had occupied on the other ship, as though expecting to find her daughter there.

Her agonized voice penetrated down the stairway: "_Figlia mia_!...

_Mia figlia!_" Ulysses could not stand it.

That voice hurt him, as though its piercing cry were clawing at his brain.
He approached a group in the center of which was a young barefooted lad in trousers and shirt open at the breast who was talking and talking, wrapping himself from time to time in a shawl that some one had placed upon his shoulders.
He was describing in a mixture of French and Italian the loss of the _Californian_.
He had been awakened by hearing the first shot fired by the submersible against his steamer.