She stopped through weakness.
“Where is Dr. Hopf?” asked Kennedy, trying to recall her fleeting attention.
“Dr. Hopf? Dr. Hopf?” she repeated, then smiling to herself as people will when they are leaving the borderline of anesthesia, she repeated the name, “Hopf?”
“Yes,” persisted Kennedy.
“There is no Dr. Hopf,” she added. “Tell me—did—did they—”
“No Dr. Hopf?” Kennedy insisted.
She had lapsed again into half insensibility.
He rose and faced us, speaking rapidly.
“New York seems to have a mysterious and uncanny attraction for odds and ends of humanity, among them the great army of adventuresses. In fact there often seems to be something decidedly adventurous about the nursing profession. This is a girl of unusual education in medicine. Evidently she has traveled—her letters show it. Many of them show that she has been in Italy. Perhaps it was there that she heard of the drug that has been used in this case. It was she who injected the germ-free toxin, first into the dog, then into Mrs. Blake, she who wrote the blackmail letter which was to have explained the death.”
He paused. Evidently she had heard dimly, was straining every effort to hear. In her effort she caught sight of our faces.