“Something always turned up to keep me from starving.  Once a woman stopped me in the street and gave me a dollar.  She said I looked so hungry she couldn’t go by me without doing it.

“Another time I was taken sick in one of the parks, something like Rex.  I fell down in a kind of faint, and when I came to I was in a hospital and I stayed there quite a little while.

“After I got out it was spring and I thought I’d try the country.  I didn’t beg; only asked for work.  Sometimes I got it; many more times I didn’t.

“Now and then if they didn’t give me work they’d offer me milk or a cup of coffee, so I managed to pull through somehow.

“At last I got back to New York.  I’d been wanting to get there again ever since the thought came to me one day that perhaps some friends of Mr. Morrisey’s might know something about the man who had given me to him when I was a baby.

“With a good deal of trouble I found one of them.  He was a bricklayer, and he told me as near as he could remember the man who gave me to Tim Morrisey was from Philadelphia, and that’s all he knew.

“Then I wanted to go to Philadelphia.

“‘But what good will that do you, Miles?’ Mr. Beesley asked.  ’You can’t find out any more there, nor as much, as you can here.’

“‘No,’ I told him, ’but if I’m there maybe somebody else’ll find out something from passing me in the street.’

“‘That’s an idea, sure enough,’ he said, so I started for Philadelphia, and that’s how I came to fall in with Rex.”

Miles finished his story with this word.  It almost seemed as if he had done it on purpose, planning for it, as it were.  He always spoke the name with a little pause before it, as if it were something sacred.

Rex had told him to call him by it the day before when he had started in to address him as “Mr. Pell.”  All of Reginald’s striving after premature manhood had been left in that past which preceded his experiences in the hotel at New York.

CHAPTER XXVI

 In winter days

Miles’s story had been listened to with the closest attention by all the little party.

“It’s just like a chapter out of a book,” Florence whispered to Roy.  “I wonder if he’ll ever find out who he really is?”

“But how did you come by the name Harding?” Roy inquired.  “Weren’t you Miles Morrisey once?”

“Yes, but when they went away, and I got to having such hard knocks from the world, I didn’t want to drag the name down with me, and so I thought Harding would suit me pretty well, and took it.”

Rex seemed inclined to grow excited over the theme, so Mrs. Raynor proposed an immediate adjournment.

“To-morrow is Sunday,” she said, “and Miles can have a long day with you.”

In the course of this long day, the wanderer told Roy why he had been so drawn to Rex.