The girl walked unsteadily toward her. “Mother, don’t you hear me? I’ve come home to stay. I want to be good!”

And then she fell in a heap, but before her hands could touch her mother’s feet, the mother was beside her, lifting her head until it lay where once it had lain as an innocent baby, on the bosom of a forgiving mother, nearest of all earthly places to the heart of God.

There, as they sat together, the girl told her mother what had happened to her. “I was in the wine room at Castalina’s when a person came in and sat down at a table alone. I was sitting where I could see him better than the others, and his face—oh, Mother, it was the face of all the sorrows of the world!

“And as he looked at me, I knew at once the awful sin of my life and the horrible pit into which my soul was slipping. As he looked at me, it seemed he singled me out from all in the room as a lost soul that he had come to save. And when he rose from the table, I got up, all the rest calling to me and wondering, but I put my fingers in my ears and ran out.

“He was there at the foot of the steps, and then I knew it was Jesus. Yes, even we who have been living deeply in sin have heard of his presence in this wicked city. And when I saw him standing there, I knew it was he. Who else in all the world could have touched my wild, wayward heart?

“I knelt at his feet, Mother, and he put his hand on my head, forgave my sins, and told me to go home. How can I ever thank him? He forgave my sins! He told me to go and sin no more. And I have come home, Mother, I have come home. And I want to be good! He said I might be as white as snow. Oh, Mother, you do not know how good it seems to me to be at home again, and your arms around me!”

Mother and daughter mingled their hearts of love and thanksgiving as they talked together. Once the mother paused in her questions to ask, “Tell me again of his appearance.”

The girl related it as well as she could.

“It must have been the same!” the mother cried. And she told of her experience with the stranger in the hotel.

“Mother, he has put his hand on your head as well as mine! Do you not feel a strange, new, joyful life such as you never knew before? It is the touch of Jesus.”

“The touch of Jesus!” the mother murmured. “Oh, if only your father and Roger could feel it! Then our happiness would be complete.”