Alone in his little room, Charles became conscious of a vast sense of fatigue, induced, no doubt, by the fact that his fears concerning his brother\'s fate were now allayed. Removing his coat and shoes, he threw himself on the hard, narrow bed and was soon soundly asleep. He did not awaken till three o\'clock in the afternoon, and might have slept longer but for the harsh sound of a truck delivering coal through a sheet-iron chute into the basement of a house next door. He lay for several minutes trying to recall some vaguely delectable and flitting dreams he had just been enjoying. Somehow, by sheer contrast to their evanescent quality, the sordid little room and its meager furnishings produced a depression that had not come to him since the beginning of his flight. His thoughts were on his home, and he was all but faint under the sharp realization that it was his home no longer.

Presently he heard a step on the stairs. It was a slow, discouraged one, and the man who made it opened the room adjoining his and went in, leaving the door open. Feeling the need of fresh air, Charles got up and opened his own door. And as he did so he saw the inmate of the other room standing over the open trunk. To his surprise he recognized him as the man whose acquaintance he had made at the restaurant. Their eyes met.

"I see you got fixed," the stranger said, with a smile that seemed forced. "Well, you will like it, all right, I think. As for me, I\'m bounced. I\'ve had my walking-papers. Mrs. Reilly is a good soul, but she has to live, and I don\'t blame her. Do you know, she was awfully good about it—tried to let me down easy, says I can take my trunk and all that, and forget what I owe her. Take my trunk! Huh! as if I\'d carry it out on my shoulder, which I\'d have to do or cheat the expressman out of his dues."

"I\'m sorry you are going," Charles said. "I wish we could be neighbors."

"Well, so am I," the other responded, listlessly, "but we can\'t have everything our way. After all, the sleeping is good in the parks such weather as this. I\'ve done it, and I can do it again, but I sha\'n\'t need a trunk. I\'ll leave it. And I\'ll pay Mrs. Reilly some day. I\'ve always paid my way."

Some one was coming. It was the landlady herself. Her face was very grave and full of feeling. She seemed slightly surprised at finding the two men together. Charles explained how they had met at breakfast.

"And he sent you to me?" she said. "He recommended me?"

"Yes, that is how I got the address," Charles returned.

She turned on the young man suddenly. She was trying to smile, though her face was full of contradictory emotions. "Mr. Mason," she faltered, as she touched him on his arm, "I must tell you the truth, and I\'ll do it right here, facing this gentleman. I hardly slept a wink last night, tired as I was from house-cleaning and beating carpets, because I said what I did yesterday about you leaving. And now I hear in this roundabout way that you have been trying to help me. Humph!" she laughed, making a sound in her throat like a suppressed sob, "do you think I\'m going to let you go? Not on your life. I\'ve never had a young man under my roof that I liked better. I\'d rather keep you here for nothing than to get money for the room from some of the scamps that are floating about."

"You are very good, Mrs. Reilly," Mason said, with emotion on his part, "but I don\'t think, owing you for three weeks already, that—"

"Three weeks nothing! Cut that out!" she exclaimed. She strode to a window and examined the tattered shade. "There is no demand for rooms now, anyway. Do you hear me, you are going to stay? I\'ve got to have new shades here, that\'s all there is about it. Yes, I want you to stay, Mr. Mason, and that settles it. You will find work, I\'m sure of it. It is a dull season, that\'s all. Business will pick up later. It always does."

Mason was blandly protesting, his color high in his cheeks, when she suddenly whirled from the room.

"You are to stay!" she called back from the head of the stairs. "You talk to him, sir," she added to Charles. "He is a nice young man and needs a home of some sort."

The situation being embarrassing, Charles went into his own room. Mason, now without his coat and his shirt-collar open, stalked in after him.

"Sorry you had to hear all that," he said with wincing, tight-drawn lips. "Great God! do you know, sir, that the hardest thing on earth for an able-bodied man to do is to receive help from a working-woman? God! it stings like fire—it kills me!"

"I see, I see," Charles answered. "Your feeling is natural to your particular temperament. In your case you\'d better owe it to a man. I want to be frank with you, Mr. Mason. You can do me a favor. I have the money to spare, and I want you to let me advance it for you."

"You? You? Great God! man, you are not in earnest! You don\'t mean it!"

"But I do," Charles said, firmly. "It is selfish on my part, too, for I don\'t want you to go away. I\'m a stranger here and I\'m lonely. I\'m out of work myself; I want your companionship; strangers though we are to each other, I feel as if we were old friends. I can\'t tell why this is, but I do."

"I know, I guess," said the astounded man as he sank into the chair near the window. "I suppose we are both troubled to some extent. I thought you looked bothered a little at breakfast this morning. I\'d like to be with you, too, but I couldn\'t start out in any stranger\'s debt like that, you know. It is—is almost as bad, you see, as owing a woman."

"You mustn\'t feel as you do in regard to me, at least," Charles said. "I am without a home. I don\'t want to be alone. I would love to share the little I have with you. Something draws me to you like ties of blood."

It was significant that Mason made no reply. He leaned forward, clasping his big freckled hands between his knees. He dropped his head, his reddish-brown curls lopped over his wide brow. He was silent. Charles saw his shoulders rise and fall convulsively, as if he were trying to suppress a tumult of feeling. Presently he raised his head. His hunger-pinched lips were twisted awry.

"My God!" he gulped, "I didn\'t know I\'d ever run across a fellow like you. I thank you! I thank you! I thank you!" He got up; his knees, in his frayed, bulging trousers, shook visibly. He moved to the door, passed through it, and went into his own room. From his position near the door Charles saw him reel past the trunk, totter, and clutch a post of the old-fashioned bed. Holding it, he stood swaying back and forth, his head hanging low on a limp neck. Charles ran to him, caught his arm, and made him lie down on the bed. Mason was ghastly pale.

"It is nothing," he said, trying to smile carelessly. "It will pass over. I had it once yesterday in the street."

"I know what it is." Charles bent over him tenderly. "You are weak from hunger."

"Do you think that is it?" Mason asked, resignedly, doggedly.

"Yes, and it has to end right here and now. We are friends, aren\'t we? I\'m going down and bring you something this minute. It is not a woman that is offering it, Mason. It is a friend who knows what suffering is. Wait! Lie still. I\'ll hurry back."

From the restaurant where he had breakfasted that morning Charles secured some hot chicken broth with bread and coffee. As he was hurrying back, he met a newsboy selling afternoon papers. The thought darted through his brain that the papers might contain an account of his flight which had been telegraphed from Boston, and he bought a paper and thrust it into his pocket. He met Mrs. Reilly as he was entering the front door. Hurriedly he explained the reason for his bringing the food.

"Good gracious!" she cried. "I thought he looked bad. One of my roomers said it was dope, but I didn\'t believe him. And I was turning him out in that condition! Think of it—just think of it!"

"I am to pay the back rent he owes, Mrs. Reilly," Charles said, putting the things down on a step of the chair and taking out his purse.

"You? Not on your life!" she threw back, warmly. "Do you think I\'ll let a stranger come and do more for that poor boy than I\'ve done, when he was going about drumming up trade for me after what I said to him? Not on your life! I\'ll feed him, too, from this on. I\'ll bring him his breakfast if he ain\'t able to come down in the morning."

Seeing that she would not receive the money, Charles took up the things and ascended the stairs. He found Mason seated at the window in the cooling breeze from the open space in the rear.

His eyes held the eager gleam of a starving man shipwrecked on a raft. He tried to make light of his hunger as Charles hurriedly placed a small table near him and filled a soup-plate with the rich broth, which contained tender fragments of chicken.

"Here, tackle this, you chump!" said Charles, and he laughed as he used to laugh in his school-days. "The idea of your letting yourself starve in this great, enlightened, Christian city!"

Mason obeyed. A warm look of reviving health was in his face as he drank the soup. The plate was soon empty. Charles filled it again, and poured out the hot coffee. As he did so he felt the folded newspaper in his pocket, and a sudden cool shock of dismay went through him. What might not the paper say? Some one might have seen him take the train in Boston. Some one might have watched him on his arrival in New York. The very house he was in might already be shadowed by instructed officials. Men nowadays were captured easily enough in the vast network of the detective system.

As he crumbled his bread into the broth Mason\'s satisfied glance swept the face of his companion. "What are you worried about?" he asked. "I saw you change all at once like you was t............