Down went the Angel’s face and a heavy sob shook her.  Freckles’ clasp tightened around her shoulders, while his face, in its conflicting emotions, was a study.  He was so stunned and bewildered by the miracle that had been performed in bringing to light his name and relatives that he had no strength left for elaborate mental processes.  Despite all it meant to him to know his name at last, and that he was of honorable birth—­knowledge without which life was an eternal disgrace and burden the one thing that was hammering in Freckles’ heart and beating in his brain, past any attempted expression, was the fact that, while nameless and possibly born in shame, the Angel had told him that she loved him.  He could find no word with which to begin to voice the rapture of his heart over that.  But if she regretted it—­if it had been a thing done out of her pity for his condition, or her feeling of responsibility, if it killed him after all, there was only one thing left to do.  Not for McLean, not for the Bird Woman, not for the Duncans would Freckles have done it—­but for the Angel—­if it would make her happy—­he would do anything.

“Angel,” whispered Freckles, with his lips against her hair, “you haven’t learned your history book very well, or else you’ve forgotten.”

“Forgotten what?” sobbed the Angel.

“Forgotten about the real knight, Ladybird,” breathed Freckles.  “Don’t you know that, if anything happened that made his lady sorry, a real knight just simply couldn’t be remembering it?  Angel, darling little Swamp Angel, you be listening to me.  There was one night on the trail, one solemn, grand, white night, that there wasn’t ever any other like before or since, when the dear Boss put his arm around me and told me that he loved me; but if you care, Angel, if you don’t want it that way, why, I ain’t remembering that anyone else ever did—­not in me whole life.”

The Angel lifted her head and looked into the depths of Freckles’ honest gray eyes, and they met hers unwaveringly; but the pain in them was pitiful.

“Do you mean,” she demanded, “that you don’t remember that a brazen, forward girl told you, when you hadn’t asked her, that she”—­the Angel choked on it a second, but she gave a gulp and brought it out bravely—­“that she loved you?”

“No!” cried Freckles.  “No!  I don’t remember anything of the kind!”

But all the songbirds of his soul burst into melody over that one little clause:  “When you hadn’t asked her.”

“But you will,” said the Angel.  “You may live to be an old, old man, and then you will.”

“I will not!” cried Freckles.  “How can you think it, Angel?”

“You won’t even look as if you remember?”

“I will not!” persisted Freckles.  “I’ll be swearing to it if you want me to.  If you wasn’t too tired to think this thing out straight, you’d be seeing that I couldn’t—­that I just simply couldn’t!  I’d rather give it all up now and go into eternity alone, without ever seeing a soul of me same blood, or me home, or hearing another man call me by the name I was born to, than to remember anything that would be hurting you, Angel.  I should think you’d be understanding that it ain’t no ways possible for me to do it.”