“If I can,” said Freckles in agony.  “It’s just this.  Angels are from above.  Outcasts are from below.  You’ve a sound body and you’re beautifulest of all.  You have everything that loving, careful raising and money can give you.  I have so much less than nothing that I don’t suppose I had any right to be born.  It’s a sure thing—­nobody wanted me afterward, so of course, they didn’t before.  Some of them should have been telling you long ago.”

“If that’s all you have to say, Freckles, I’ve known that quite a while,” said the Angel stoutly.  “Mr. McLean told my father, and he told me.  That only makes me love you more, to pay for all you’ve missed.”

“Then I’m wondering at you,” said Freckles in a voice of awe.  “Can’t you see that if you were willing and your father would come and offer you to me, I couldn’t be touching the soles of your feet, in love—­me, whose people brawled over me, cut off me hand, and throwed me away to freeze and to die!  Me, who has no name just as much because I’ve no right to any, as because I don’t know it.  When I was little, I planned to find me father and mother when I grew up.  Now I know me mother deserted me, and me father was maybe a thief and surely a liar.  The pity for me suffering and the watching over me have gone to your head, dear Angel, and it’s me must be thinking for you.  If you could be forgetting me lost hand, where I was raised, and that I had no name to give you, and if you would be taking me as I am, some day people such as mine must be, might come upon you.  I used to pray ivery night and morning and many times the day to see me mother.  Now I only pray to die quickly and never risk the sight of her.  ’Tain’t no ways possible, Angel!  It’s a wildness of your dear head.  Oh, do for mercy sake, kiss me once more and be letting me go!”

“Not for a minute!” cried the Angel.  “Not for a minute, if those are all the reasons you have.  It’s you who are wild in your head, but I can understand just how it happened.  Being shut in that Home most of your life, and seeing children every day whose parents did neglect and desert them, makes you sure yours did the same; and yet there are so many other things that could have happened so much more easily than that.  There are thousands of young couples who come to this country and start a family with none of their relatives here.  Chicago is a big, wicked city, and grown people could disappear in many ways, and who would there ever be to find to whom their little children belonged?  The minute my father told me how you felt, I began to study this thing over, and I’ve made up my mind you are dead wrong.  I meant to ask my father or the Bird Woman to talk to you before you went away to school, but as matters are right now I guess I’ll just do it myself.  It’s all so plain to me.  Oh, if I could only make you see!”

She buried her face in the pillow and presently lifted it, transfigured.