She had accepted his offer without a word. Dumb and exhausted, she had thrown her shawl over her head, and in a moment she was in a condition of half asleep, wholly worn, while the waking vision of a wayward daughter, a drunken husband, and a dependent son haunted her troubled mind.

At the end of an uncounted period of time, the woman was conscious of the living presence of this stranger again. What was he saying? Her mind feebly groped about to weave again the broken threads of memory. Where was that passing form of gracious helpfulness?

“Daughter, your task is done. Return home and rest there.” And then, as he passed down the stairs by her, he placed a hand on her head, and the touch was as light as a passing breath.

What was this renewing of her vital energies? How good life was after all! How deep were the wells of satisfaction that even yet could flow under the dry and burned-off wilderness of a broken heart!

She sat up and drew the shawl back from her head, her mind wonderfully calm and her body free from that deadly lethargy. She stood and looked at her hands, wrinkled and rough and scarred with incessant use. They were the same, but she felt so strong, so fit to bear burdens, that she almost longed to begin her nightly task again.

But that had all been accomplished by this stranger. What manner of man was he? She began to feel a strange and bewildering awe as if something great and unexplainable had passed by. And she sat there, dreaming awake, until dawn reminded her of the passing time.

Then she gathered up her tools of labor and went down the stairs. Leaving the things in their accustomed place below, she made her way, wondering, as she passed along through the streets just awaking now to the usual day’s toil of the great city, if the new vitality she felt were the result of her sleep there upon the stairs, or if, in some mysterious way, the stranger.

She went up the stairs of her tenement and pushed open the door to the little rooms that were all she knew of home. How often had she dragged herself up to that door, fear clutching her heart at the thought of what she might find inside. And as she now opened the door and went in, she trembled and stepped back as if the usual terror were confronting her.

But a girl, who had been sitting with her head bowed on the bare table in the middle of the room, sprang up as the woman entered. She stood there, in all the cheap, painted advertisement of her calling, looking ghastly in the morning light, her hands clenched, furrows of hot tears running down the paint on her cheeks.

“Mother!” the girl cried out. “Mother, I’ve come back home!”

The older woman stood still.