e door, McLean and the surgeon anxiously awaited her. McLean
caught her shoulders.

"Angel, what have you done?" he demanded.

The Angel smiled defiance into his eyes.

"'What have I done?'" she repeated. "I've tried to save Freckles."

"What will your father say?" groaned McLean.

"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?"

The Angel stood dazed and speechless, staring at the matron.

"There couldn't have been a mistake," continued the matron, seeing the
Angel's distress. "Freckles was here when I took charge, ten years ago.
These people had it all proved that he belonged to them. They had
him traced to where he ran away in Illinois last fall, and there they
completely lost track of him. I'm sorry you seem so disappointed, but it
is all right. The man is his uncle, and as like the boy as he possibly
could be. He is almost killed to go back without him. If you know where
Freckles is, they'd give big money to find out."

The Angel laid a hand along each cheek to steady her chattering teeth.

"Who are they?" she stammered.