The weeping girl looked appealingly through her tears at the one who had befriended her. "Oh, please," she whispered, in a voice broken with sobs, "don't let them send me to that awful place. It'll only make me worse; take me with you. I'll do anything you tell me; please, oh! please, Miss Moffatt."
Turning to the Judge the Superintendent said, "Your Honour, I am a stranger to you, but as a representative of the Women's Council of the —— Church in Canada may I say a few words?" The Judge nodded assent, and with a heart full of love for the wayward, Miss Moffatt made one of the most impassioned appeals conceivable. In closing, she said, "I ask your Honour to give this girl into my charge for one year. In view of the evidence given, may I be allowed to say that she has been brutally sinned against. No man who has spoken has referred to her partners in sin, nor has any man suggested that the stronger sex has any responsibility to be a brother and protector of girls. The evidence reveals the fact that plenty of men co-operated in her downfall; apparently not one made any effort to uplift. Some of her betrayers are still counted as respectable men, while she receives all the blame and the shame. One remedy does not seem to have been tried, and in the name of the One who long ago said, 'Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more,' I ask you to be gracious enough to allow me to try a corrective which I believe will be more effective than what has been suggested."
The Judge caught the light in those eyes, and with manifest emotion addressed the accused: "Lavina, you have found a friend; so long as you are true to her you will not again be called to appear before this Court. May Heaven's blessing rest upon such women as the one who has spoken in your behalf! The case is dismissed."
Once again Lavina journeyed Westward. Once again she was on No. 96, but no longer with betrayers. By her side was the Superintendent with her sweet, sheltering influence.
And so life began again for Lavina in the Redemptive Home. In view of her past life, it was worth crossing a continent to see the gladness in her eyes when one day Miss Moffatt put her hand upon her shoulder and said playfully, "Lavina is my right-hand girl; I think she'll soon be Assistant Superintendent."
As one of the workers was passing along the hallway upstairs some months later she was arrested by the sound of a pleading voice—some one was offering a prayer. Noiselessly she drew near the room from which the voice came. The last petition was being uttered, "O God, please help the other girls to be good like You helped me, for Jesus' sake. Amen." The little dark-eyed girl was kneeling by the bedside with arm around the shoulder of a young Hungarian maiden who had been rescued from a life of shame. It developed later that these two rescued ones were daily praying for others who were being sheltered in the Home.
How it all reminds one of that far-away scene! "No man could bind him; no, not with chains; because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him.... Jesus said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit." And the modern evil spirit and its rebuke is like unto that. "Nobody can do anything with her; I've got this rope to bind the little devil with." And then this: "O God, please help the other girls to be good like You helped me, for Jesus' sake. Amen." On the heels of the failure of all others Jesus comes and reveals Himself to-day, as of old, as the master of demons.
What the future days hold for Lavina Berson we know not, but the height of her ambition to-day is that she be accepted for training, so that some day she may work among those of the class to which she once belonged.