“Now I have it!” she cried.  “Oh, dear heart!  I can make it so plain!  Freckles, can you imagine you see the old Limberlost trail?  Well when we followed it, you know there were places where ugly, prickly thistles overgrew the path, and you went ahead with your club and bent them back to keep them from stinging through my clothing.  Other places there were big shining pools where lovely, snow-white lilies grew, and you waded in and gathered them for me.  Oh dear heart, don’t you see?  It’s this!  Everywhere the wind carried that thistledown, other thistles sprang up and grew prickles; and wherever those lily seeds sank to the mire, the pure white of other lilies bloomed.  But, Freckles, there was never a place anywhere in the Limberlost, or in the whole world, where the thistledown floated and sprang up and blossomed into white lilies!  Thistles grow from thistles, and lilies from other lilies.  Dear Freckles, think hard!  You must see it!  You are a lily, straight through.  You never, never could have drifted from the thistle-patch.

“Where did you find the courage to go into the Limberlost and face its terrors?  You inherited it from the blood of a brave father, dear heart.  Where did you get the pluck to hold for over a year a job that few men would have taken at all?  You got it from a plucky mother, you bravest of boys.  You attacked single-handed a man almost twice your size, and fought as a demon, merely at the suggestion that you be deceptive and dishonest.  Could your mother or your father have been untruthful?  Here you are, so hungry and starved that you are dying for love.  Where did you get all that capacity for loving?  You didn’t inherit it from hardened, heartless people, who would disfigure you and purposely leave you to die, that’s one sure thing.  You once told me of saving your big bullfrog from a rattlesnake.  You knew you risked a horrible death when you did it.  Yet you will spend miserable years torturing yourself with the idea that your own mother might have cut off that hand.  Shame on you, Freckles!  Your mother would have done this——­”

The Angel deliberately turned back the cover, slipped up the sleeve, and laid her lips on the scars.

“Freckles!  Wake up!” she cried, almost shaking him.  “Come to your senses!  Be a thinking, reasoning man!  You have brooded too much, and been all your life too much alone.  It’s all as plain as plain can be to me.  You must see it!  Like breeds like in this world!  You must be some sort of a reproduction of your parents, and I am not afraid to vouch for them, not for a minute!

“And then, too, if more proof is needed, here it is:  Mr. McLean says that you never once have failed in tact and courtesy.  He says that you are the most perfect gentleman he ever knew, and he has traveled the world over.  How does it happen, Freckles?  No one at that Home taught you.  Hundreds of men couldn’t be taught, even in a school of etiquette; so it must be instinctive with you.  If it is, why, that means that it is born in you, and a direct inheritance from a race of men that have been gentlemen for ages, and couldn’t be anything else.