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.
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