Thereupon she fell into a peaceful sleep.

CHAPTER XII

THE ANGEL AGAIN

“Will she bring it back?” asked Miss Terry eagerly, when once more she found herself under the gaze of the Christmas Angel.  He nodded brightly.

“To-morrow morning you will see,” he said.  “It will prove that all I have shown you is really true.”

“A pretty child,” said Miss Terry musingly.  “A very nice child indeed.  I believe she looks very much as I used to be myself.”

“You see, she is not a thief, after all; not yet,” said the Angel.  “What a pity that she must live in that sad home, with such terrible people!  A sensitive child like her, craving sympathy and affection,—­what chance has she for happiness?  What would you yourself have been in surroundings like hers?”

“Yes, she is very like what I was.  Of course I shall let her keep the doll.”

Miss Terry hesitated.  The Angel looked at her steadily and his glance seemed to read her half-formed thoughts.

“Surely,” he said.  “It seems to belong to her, does it not?  But is this all?  I wonder if something more does not belong to her.”

“What more?” asked Miss Terry shortly.

“A home!” cried the Angel.

Miss Terry groped in her memory for a scornful ejaculation which she had once been fond of using, but there was no such word to be found.  Instead there came to her lips the name, “Mary.”

The Angel repeated it softly. “Mary. It is a blessed name,” he said. 
“Blessed the roof that shelters a Mary in her need.”

There was a long silence, in which Miss Terry felt new impulses stirring within her; impulses drawing her to the child whose looks recalled her own childhood.  The Angel regarded her with beaming eyes.  After some time he said quietly, “Now let us see what became of your last experiment.”

Miss Terry started.  It seemed as if she had been interrupted in pleasant dreaming. “You were the last experiment,” she said.  “I know what became of you.  Here you are!”

“Yet more may have happened than you guessed,” replied the Angel meaningly.  “I have tried to show you how often that is the case.  Look again.”

Without moving from her chair Miss Terry seemed to be looking out on her sidewalk, where, so it seemed, she had just laid the pink figure of the Angel.  She saw the drunken man approach.  She heard his coarse laugh; saw his brutal movement as he kicked the Christmas token into the street.  In sick disgust she saw him reel away out of sight.  She saw herself run down the steps, rescue the image, and bring it into the house.  Surely the story was finished.  What more could there be?

But something bade her vision follow the steps of the wretched man.  Down the street he reeled, singing a blasphemous song.  With a whoop he rounded a corner and ran into a happy party which filled sidewalk and street, as it hurried in the direction from which he came.  Good-naturedly they jostled him against the wall, and he grasped a railing to steady himself as they swept by.  It was the choir on their way to carol in the next street.  Before them went the cross-bearer, lifting high his simple wooden emblem.