: A defenseless, sick person suffers bullying all his life. After his death, people learn that he selflessly helped an orphan girl.

Yefim, popularly nicknamed Yushka, works as an assistant to a blacksmith. This weak man, old-looking, was only forty years old. He looks old man because of consumption, which has long been sick. Yushka has been working in the forge for so long that the locals check the clock for it: adults, seeing him go to work, awaken the young, and when he returns home, they say that it is time to have dinner and sleep.

Very often, children and adults offend Yushka, beat him, throw stones, sand and earth at him, but he suffers everything, does not take offense and is not angry with them. Sometimes children try to anger Yushka, but nothing comes of it, and sometimes they don’t even believe that Yushka is alive. Yushka himself believes that those around him show "blind love."

Yushka does not spend the earned money; he drinks only empty water. Every summer he leaves somewhere, but no one knows where exactly, and Yushka does not admit, he calls different places. People think that he goes to his daughter, the same as he, simple and useless to anyone.

Every year, Yushka from consumption is getting weaker. One summer, instead of leaving, Yushka stays at home. That evening, as usual, he returns from the forge and meets a passerby who begins to make fun of him.For the first time, Yushka does not tolerate ridicule in silence, but replies to a passerby that if he was born, it means that he needs a white light. These words do not suit the passerby. He pushes Yushka into a sore chest, he falls and dies.

A passing master finds Yushka and realizes that he is dead. All neighbors from his street, even those who offended him, come to Yushkin’s funeral. Now they didn’t get angry at them, and people began to curse more often.

Once an unfamiliar girl appears in the city, frail and pale, and begins to look for Efim Dmitrievich. Not immediately the blacksmith recalls that this was the name of Yushka.

At first, everyone considers the girl the daughter of Yushka, but she is an orphan. Yushka took care of her, first placed in the Moscow family, then in a boarding school with training. Every summer he went to the girl and gave all the money he earned to her. Knowing about Yushka’s illness, the girl learned to be a doctor and wanted to cure him. She did not know that Yushka had died - he simply did not come to her, and the girl went to look for him. The blacksmith brings her to the cemetery.

The girl remains to work in that city, selflessly helps people, and everyone calls her "Yushka’s daughter", already not remembering who Yushka is and that she doesn’t have to be her daughter.