An Italian torpedo-destroyer was maneuvering among the remains of the shipwreck, as though seeking the footprints of the author of the crime.  The steamers stopped their circular course of exploration to lower the lifeboats into the water and collect the corpses and bodies of the living near to death.

The captain in his desperate imprisonment heard new shrieks announcing an extraordinary event.  Again the cruel necessity of knowing what it could be dragged him from his stateroom!

A boat full of people had been found by the steamer.  The other ships were also meeting little by little the rest of the life boats occupied by the survivors of the catastrophe.  The general rescue was going to be a very short piece of work.

The most agile of the shipwrecked people, on reaching the deck, found themselves surrounded by sympathetic groups lamenting their misfortune and at the same time offering them hot drinks.  Others, after staggering a few steps as though intoxicated, collapsed on the benches.  Some had to be hoisted from the bottom of the boat and carried in a chair to the ship’s hospital.

Various British soldiers, serene and phlegmatic, upon climbing on deck asked for a pipe and began to smoke vigorously.  Other shipwrecked people, lightly clad, simply rolled themselves up in shawls, beginning the account of the catastrophe as minutely and serenely as though they were in a parlor.  A period of ten hours in the crowded narrowness of the boat, drifting at random in the hope of aid, had not broken down their energy.

The women showed greater desperation.  Ferragut saw in the center of a group of ladies a young English girl, blond, slender, elegant, who was sobbing and stammering explanations.  She had found herself in a launch, separated from her parents, without knowing how.  Perhaps they were dead by this time.  Her slight hope was that they might have sought refuge in some other boat and been picked up by any one of the steamers that had happened to see them.

A desperate grief, noisy, meridional, silenced with its meanings the noise of conversation.  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.