"Take me to her," I said, abruptly.
We went into the room where I had seen the woman and the sobbing child. The woman was not more
than twenty-seven or-eight, I judged, and in ordinary circumstances would have been unusually
attractive. Now her face was drawn and bloodless, in her eyes horror, and a fear on the very borderline
of madness. She stared at me, vacantly; she kept rubbing her lips with the tips of her forefingers, staring
at me with those eyes out of which looked a mind emptied of everything but fear and grief. The child, a
girl of no more than four, kept up her incessant sobbing. McCann shook the woman by the shoulder.
"Snap out of it, Mollie," he said, roughly, but pityingly, too. "Here's the Doc."
The woman became aware of me, abruptly. She looked at me steadily for slow moments, then asked,
less like one questioning than one relinquishing a last thin thread of hope: