“It strikes me,” said the Angel, “that what Freckles said would be to the point.”
“Freckles!” exclaimed McLean. “What could he say?”
“He seemed to be able to say several things,” answered the Angel sweetly. “I fancy the one that concerns you most at present was, that if my father should offer me to him he would not have me.”
“And no one knows why better than I do,” cried McLean. “Every day he must astonish me with some new fineness.”
He turned to the surgeon. “Save him!” he commanded. “Save him!” he implored. “He is too fine to be sacrificed.”
“His salvation lies here,” said the surgeon, stroking the Angel's sunshiny hair, “and I can read in the face of her that she knows how she is going to work it out. Don't trouble for the boy. She will save him!”
The Angel laughingly sped down the hall, and into the street, just as she was.
“I have come,” she said to the matron of the Home, “to ask if you will allow me to examine, or, better yet, to take with me, the little clothes that a boy you called Freckles, discharged last fall, wore the night he was left here.”
The woman looked at her in greater astonishment than the occasion demanded.
“Well, I'd be glad to let you see them,” she said at last, “but the fact is we haven't them. I do hope we haven't made some mistake. I was thoroughly convinced, and so was the superintendent. We let his people take those things away yesterday. Who are you, and what do you want with them?”