A month passed, and Scott was as perplexed as ever. To seek for any particular man in a crowded city like New York was like seeking a needle in a haystack. Besides, he might have left New York and gone to some other city, perhaps to the West.
Yet the man of whom he was in search was, at that very moment, occupying a shabby lodging on Bleecker Street, with his wife and two children. Moreover, his son, a boy a few months younger than Scott, was employed by Ezra Little, in his Eighth Avenue store, at a salary of three dollars a week.
Let us look in upon the Kents in their humble home.
The apartments consisted of three rooms, after the usual fashion of New York tenements. In the one large room, sitting in a big rocking-chair, was a man of middle age, with an expression of pain upon his delicate and refined features. He had been for some time the victim of a rheumatic affection which at times prevented him from working.
At half-past six the door opened, and a slender, dark-haired boy entered the room.
"How do you feel, father?" asked the boy, with a glance of sympathy toward his suffering parent.
"No better, Harold. It is very trying to be tied hand and foot by pain when I ought to be at work."
"If your father would worry less," said Mrs. Kent, a pleasant-looking woman, somewhat younger than her husband, "he would be more likely to get well."
"How can I help worrying, Clara? We are barely able to live when I can work. Now, with only Harold's wages coming in, it is difficult to tell how we shall come out. Did you ask Mr. Little if he would raise you, Harold?"