“That’s it,” returned Rex.  “Life is something you must go ahead with.  You can’t lay it down when you get tired.  All right; I’ll remember what you say, Roy, but it’s an awful come down.”

Rex, however, “came up to the scratch,” as he himself would have expressed it, nobly the next day.

Nobody went to church, and about half past eleven the door bell rang and “Mr. Darley and son” were announced.

Miles, as we shall continue to call him, sent up word to know if he could come up to Rex’s room.

“Do you know?” asked Reginald, as he met him in the doorway.

“Yes; Mr. Sydney came around to us this morning.  I can’t understand it.  But I don’t want you to feel—­”

Miles hesitated.  It was very embarrassing for him to express just what he wanted to say.  Rex helped him out.

“I’m awfully glad for you, old fellow,” he said heartily.  “And I don’t want you to worry about us.  We’ll get along some way.”

“But that won’t do,” Miles persisted.  “If it hadn’t been for you I might have been a common tramp now and never found my father.”

“And if it hadn’t been for you I would probably have been dead long ago,” Rex retorted.  “So you see we’re quits.”

“No, we’re not, and I don’t want that we should, till I give you what I think you ought to have.  Father says I may and—­”

“Miles Harding—­ Darley, I mean, if you do that I’ll—­ I’ll never speak to you again.  There, take your choice—­ quits or my friendship.”

Rex’s pride conquered.  Miles was still his slave.

“I’ll never say another word about it, Rex,” he replied meekly, and for the first time Reginald felt that he could face poverty bravely.

CHAPTER XXXV

 A fistic encounter

It is summer again, but in Batemans the town in which we now find our friends, the Pells, this banner season of the year, does not deck itself with all the attractions that caused it to be eagerly looked forward to in Marley.

There are no creek, no hills, no trees, nothing but board walks, board houses, board fences, and the “boarders we take,” as Rex would conclude the sentence.  And these are the same in summer as they are in winter, except that they are all hotter and more unpleasant than ordinary.

Batemans is a far Western town.  A friend of Mrs. Pell’s was putting up a hotel there at the time of her trouble.  He had appealed to her for some woman to run it.

“I don’t want a man,” he wrote.  “There are too many men out here now.  I want somebody who will give home comforts which I want to make a speciality of, in place of a bar.”

Mrs. Pell considered it a providential opportunity.  She replied stating that she would take it herself if she could have her children to help her.  And they had gone out there in February.

Mr. Darley had been kindness itself.  He not only refused to prosecute Sydney, but wanted to settle a portion of his fortune on the Pells.