“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.