A Little Volunteer

• 1916
• Other, Drama

Wealthy widower Richard Sinclaire's 12-year-old daughter Joyce has everything she desires except the companionship of other young people. One day she encounters the three Dawson children and goes with them to their tenement home. They have no mother and their drunken father is away on one of his periodical disappearances, and Joyce tries to mother him. She writes a note to her father telling him she won't be home for some time until she has corrected all the Dawson family's ills. No address is given and Sinclaire, fearing that she's been kidnapped, starts the police on the search. Meanwhile, Joyce has persuaded the dissolute Dawson to go to work to buy food for his starving children. To get money quick he tries burglary and is shot and killed; that night Sinclaire and the police find Joyce. At the station, Sinclaire recognizes the body of Dawson as that of his ne'er-do-well brother Frank Sinclaire, and tells Joyce. She tells him that she adopted the orphans: "Now you adopt them. I'd rather be a sister than a mother to them anyway."