I followed quickly and the three of us entered the house together.
I remember the musty, warm, shut-in odour of the front room. I heard the
faint cry of a child. The room was dim, with a single kerosene lamp, but
I saw three women huddled by the stove, in which a new fire was blazing.
Two looked up as we entered, with feminine instinct moving aside to hide
the form of the third.
"She's all right, as soon as she gets dry," one of them said.
The other woman turned to us half complainingly:
"She ain't said a single word since we got her in here, and she won't
let go of the baby for a minute."
"She don't cry," said the other, "but just sits there like a statue."
McAlway stepped forward and said:
"Well--Anna?"
The girl looked up for the first time. The light shone full in her face:
a look I shall never forget. Yes, it was the girl I had seen so often,
and yet not the girl. It was the same childish face, but all marked upon
with inexplicable wan lines of a certain mysterious womanhood. It was
childish, but bearing upon it an inexpressible look of half-sad dignity,
that stirred a man's heart to its profoundest depths. And there was in
it, too, as I have thought since, a something I have seen in the faces
of old, wise men: a light (how shall I explain it?) as of experience--of
boundless experience.
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