"Couldn't I take her home?" she asked me. "To my home?"
I was busy pushing back the crowd.
"No," I told her, "a hospital's best. I'll put her in your car there. Then you run her over to the Roosevelt. That's even better than waiting for an ambulance."
I stooped over the injured girl again and felt her pulse. It struck me as an amazingly strong and steady pulse for any one in such a predicament. And her respiration, I noticed, was very close to normal. I examined each side of her face, and inspected her lips and even her tongue-tip, to see if some cut or abrasion there couldn't account for that disturbing streak of blood. But I could find neither cut nor bruise, and by this time the old man was again making himself heard.
"You'll take her to no pest-house," he was excitedly proclaiming. "She'll come home with me—what's left of her. She must come home with me!"
Mary Lockwood stared at him with her tragic and still slightly bewildered eyes.
"Very well," she quietly announced. "I'll take her home. I'll take you both home."
And at this the old man seemed immensely relieved.
"Where is it you want to go?" I rather impatiently demanded of him. For I'd decided to get them away from there, for Mary's sake, before the inevitable patrolman or reporter happened along.
"On the other side of Brooklyn," explained the bereft one, with a vague hand-wave toward the east. I had to push back the crowd again, before I was able to gather the limp form up from its asphalted resting-place.