“Cordova!” exclaimed Marco. “Where is Cordova? And the person whom they had in their service? The woman, my mother! Their servant was my mother! Have they taken my mother away, too?”
The young lady looked at him and said: “I do not know. Perhaps my father may know, for he knew them when they went away. Wait a moment.”
She ran away, and soon returned with her father, a tall gentleman, with a gray beard. He looked intently for a minute at this sympathetic type of a little Genoese sailor, with his golden hair and his aquiline nose, and asked him in broken Italian, “Is your mother a Genoese?”
Marco replied that she was.
“Well then, the Genoese maid went with them; that I know for certain.”
“And where have they gone?”
“To Cordova, a city.”
The boy gave vent to a sigh; then he said with resignation, “Then I will go to Cordova.”
“Ah, poor child!” exclaimed the gentleman in Spanish; “poor boy! Cordova is hundreds of miles from here.”
Marco turned as white as a corpse, and clung with one hand to the railings.