She was the loveliest girl in all the neighborhood, with a dainty, graceful figure and a gay, merry soul. Words could not tell how she loved her father; for, after a few years of peace and joy in this land, the mother, who had never recovered from the horrors through which she had passed, died. Her last hours were so sweetly peaceful that the loss to those left behind was more of a chastened sorrow than a poignant grief. Dora was now sixteen, and matured like the maidens of her race. The father loved Dora with a brooding tenderness almost womanlike in its intensity, and her little hands held his very heart in their grasp. Nothing she did seemed wrong to him, and everything she wanted, that was in his power to give, she had. Above all, he was proud of her education, for that had been his first desire. Dora was kept in school when other girls of her age had worked in factories. She kept house for him in the room above the shop, and she was a good, sweet, obedient daughter. What more could a man ask? A business that kept them from want, and something left over every month. No wonder the honest shoemaker sang as he worked in his little shop as he listened to the steps of his daughter above. [Illustration] CHAPTER I. This brief preamble brings the reader to the day and hour when the first movements in this moving human drama began. Morris Goldberg had left his humble store in charge of Dora and a little semi-idiotic boy, whom he had rescued from the streets. The little fellow was thin and white, and dressed in a medley of garments purchased for him from a second-hand store nearby. The child was trying to sew a shoe while seated upon the vacant bench. Dora sat beside him, trying to guide the clumsy fingers, with infinite patience. “Now, this way, Loney; both ends at the same time. One this way and one that way. Oh, you will succeed if you keep on. You’ll be as good a shoemaker as father some day.” “I’m trying, Dora. I try so hard, but my hands won’t mind me. I’m just no good at all.” This the child said with such an expression of utter discouragement that Dora put her plump arm around the little figure, saying: “Oh, yes you are, Loney. You do lots of things, and you are splendid for errands.” “Anybody can run errands; but I want to be something else than an errand-boy. I want to know how to do other things--how to be something in the world, but my head won’t let me. It gets all ‘hurty’ when I try to think what I want to do.” “Poor little Loney! Tell me how you got hurt, Loney? You have never told me that. Can’t you tell me now? Maybe the doctor could cure it if we knew how it happened. Try to remember.” The poor, thin little hand went to his head uncertainly, while Loney knitted his brows trying to remember. Then he said; dreamily: