He sat for some minutes looking at her without speaking.

She, too, was pensive and silent, while the fire sputtered and sang, the great logs slowly melting, the flames tossing wisps of smoke into the chimney still booming to the wind.
"I know, too, that I am not French," she presently resumed, "but I don't know just how I know it.

My first words must have been English, for I have always dreamed of talking in that language, and my dimmest half recollections of the old days are of a large, white house, and a soft-voiced black woman, who sang to me in that language the very sweetest songs in the world." It must be borne in mind that all this was told by Alice in her creole French, half bookish, half patois, of which no translation can give any fair impression.
Beverley listened, as one who hears a clever reader intoning a strange and captivating poem.

He was charmed.

His imagination welcomed the story and furnished it with all that it lacked of picturesque completeness.