on, and he generally had food of some sort,
although the mother sometimes went without food for days. Through the
squalor and misery and degradation of her own life Bennie had somehow
been kept unsullied, a thing apart.

"H'm!" said judge Wheeling, and looked at Bennie. Bennie was standing
beside his mother. He was very quiet, and his eyes were smiling up into
those of the battered creature who was fighting for him. "I guess we'll
have to take you out of this," the judge decided, abruptly. "That boy is
too good to go to waste."

The sodden, dazed woman before him did not immediately get the full
meaning of his words. She still stood there, swaying a bit, and staring
unintelligently at the judge. Then, quite suddenly, she realized it.
She took a quick step forward. Her hand went up to her breast, to her
throat, to her lips, with an odd, stifled gesture.

"You ain't going to take him away! From me! No, you wouldn't do
that, would you? Not for--not for always! You wouldn't do that--you
wouldn't--"

Judge Wheeling waved her away. But the woman dropped to her knees.

"Judge, give me a chance! I'll stop drinking. Only don't take him away
from me! Don't, judge, don't! He's all I've got in the world. Give me a
chance. Three months! Six months! A year!"

"Get up!" ordered judge Wheeling, gruffly, "and stop that! It won't do
you a bit of good."

And then a wonderful thing happened. The woman rose to her feet. A
new and strange dignity had come into her battered face. The lines
of suffering and vice were erased as by magic, and she seemed to grow
taller, younger, almost beautiful. When she spoke again it was slowly
and distinctly, her words quite free from the blur of the barroom and
street vernacular.

"I tell you you must give me a chance. You cannot take a child from a
mother in this way. I tell you, if you will only help me I can crawl
back up the road that I've traveled. I was not always like this. There
was another life, before--before--Oh, since then there have been years
of blackness, and hunger, and cold and--worse! But I never dragged the
boy into it. Look at him!"

Our eyes traveled from the woman's transfigured face to that of the boy.
We could trace a wonderful likeness where before we had seen none. But
the woman went on in her steady, even tone.

"I can't talk as I should, because my brain isn't clear. It's the drink.
When you drink, you forget. But you must help me. I can't do it alone.
I can remember