The Criminal (1916)

A young Italian immigrant girl, uneducated and superstitious, finds an abandoned baby on the stairs of her tenement, with a note attached explaining the baby is illegitimate. A young newspaper reporter, whom the girl knows from waiting on him at the restaurant where she works, reads the note for her. But the police arrest her, at no evidence whatsoever other than possession of the baby, for kidnapping. She refuses to tell them the baby was abandoned and fatherless, because she was herself, and confesses, in order to save the baby from being branded a bastard, that she stole it. The reporter goes to the jail and elicits the truth from her. And then proposes to her and adopts the baby.