“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.
His temperament had always been a sympathetic one. He had many times received harsh treatment that would never have come to him, by seeking to protect some persecuted cat or dog.
Thus far the recipient of his kindly ministrations had always been some dumb animal. Now that the opportunity had offered to extend these to a human being, Miles was loath to put it aside.