“Yes, he’s very sick, I’m afraid,” replied Miles.

“Is he your brother?” went on Florence.

“Oh, no; just—­ a friend.”

Miles hesitated before he added the last word; then when he had said it a look of pride came into his eyes for an instant.

“I’ll call mother,” said the girl, and she hurried off to the kitchen, where Mrs. Raynor was making cake.

“Oh, mama,” she exclaimed, “the noise I heard was two tramps who had come in on our piazza out of the rain.  At least one of them is a tramp, and the other is the nicest looking boy, about the age of our Bert.  He’s sick and just as pale!  But he’s dressed very well, and I can’t understand how they came to be together.  Won’t you come out and see them, please?”

Mrs. Raynor scraped the dough from her lingers and followed her daughter to the front porch.  Miles had gone over to take Rex’s head on his knee and was softly stroking the hair back from the damp forehead.

“Oh, yes; the poor fellow is very ill,” Mrs. Raynor exclaimed as soon as she saw him.

She scarcely gave a glance at Miles.  She stood for one instant as if thinking deeply.  Then with a resolved tone, she turned to Harding.

“Can you help me get him up stairs and in bed?” she asked.

“I guess so, ma’am,” Miles replied.  “I’ve got my breath back now.  I have to carry him, you know.  You’re awfully good to take him in this way.”

“One must be terribly hard hearted to turn away one in his condition.  Come.”

Between them they lifted Rex and bore him into the house and up the broad, easy stairs to a little room at the head of them.

“We must get these wet clothes off at once,” said Mrs. Raynor, and Miles stayed there to help her.

They put him to bed, and then the good lady declared that they ought to have a doctor.

“Let me go for one,” Miles exclaimed.  “I want to do something for him.”

Mrs. Raynor, now that Rex no longer absorbed her entire attention, turned her gaze on his companion.  Miles colored beneath it.

“Perhaps you don’t think I’m fit to go?” he said slowly.

It was Mrs. Raynor’s turn to color now.  She saw that this fellow, so shabbily dressed, was of very sensitive nature.  A happy way of turning the thing off occurred to her.

“You are wet, too,” she said.  “And it is raining still.  I will have the man from the barn go.”

She hurried off down stairs to call him.  Miles lingered, looking toward the bed, where lay the fellow who had attracted him so strongly.

“I s’pose they don’t want me hanging around here any longer,” he mused.  “They can do everything for him there is to be done.  But I don’t want to leave him.”

Miles Harding’s nature was a singular one for a boy brought up as he had been.  Thrown upon his own resources when he was hardly more than twelve, he had received some pretty hard knocks from the world.  But the hardness of these had not cultivated, a like hardness in him whom they struck.