“Oh! take me to him. Tell me, tell me where he is. I’ve looked so long and I don’t know where and–please, please, please.”
For a moment nobody spoke; not even Colonel Bonnicastle, for it was he, indeed, though he silently motioned to a trustworthy man who had drawn near to take the dogs away; and who, in obedience, whistling imperatively, gathered their chains in his hands and led them back to their kennel.
When the dogs had disappeared, the master of Broadacres sank into a near-by chair, wiping his brow and pityingly regarded the little girl who still knelt, imploringly. He was trying to comprehend what had happened, what she meant, and if he had ever seen her before. Captain Simon Beck! That was a familiar name, surely, but of that ungrateful seaman, who wouldn’t be given a “Snug Harbor” whether or no, of him he had never heard nor even thought since his one memorable uncomfortable visit to Elbow Lane.
“Simon Beck–Simon Beck,” he began, musingly. “Yes, I know a Simon Beck, worthy seaman, and would befriend him if I could. Is he your grandfather, child, and what has happened to him that you speak to me so–so–well, let us say–rudely?”
Then he added, in that commanding tone which few who knew him ever disobeyed:
“Get up at once, child. Your kneeling to me is absurd, nor do I know in what way I can help you, though you think I can do so–apparently. Why! How strange–how like–”
He had stooped and raised Glory, gently forcing her to her feet, and as he did so, Bonny Angel turned her own face around from the girl’s breast where she had buried it in her terror of the dogs.
Wasted and shorn of her beautiful hair, clothed in the discarded rags of a Fogarty twin, it would have taken keen eyes indeed to recognize in the little outcast the radiant “Guardian Angel” who had flashed upon Glory’s amazed sight that day in Elbow Lane; yet something about it there was which made the near-sighted colonel grope hastily for his eyeglasses and in his haste overlook them, so that he muttered angrily at his own awkwardness.
Into the blue eyes of the little one herself crept a puzzled wondering look, that fixed itself upon the perplexed gentleman with a slowly growing comprehension.
Just then, too, when forgetting her own anxiety, Glory looked from the baby to the man and back again, startled and wondering, a lady came to the doorway and exclaimed: