Home was no more than a stifling garret, and Lovey slept on the floor like a dog. But in the morning I found my shoes cleaned as well as he could clean them without brush or blacking, my clothes folded, and the whole beastly place in such order as a friendly hand could bring to it. Lovey himself was gone. Twice during the interval he had stolen in in the same way and stolen out. He asked no more than a refuge and the privilege of sidling timidly up to me with a beseeching look in his sodden eyes when we met in bars. Once, when by hook or by crook he had got possession of a dollar, he insisted on the honor of “buying me a drink.” On this particular afternoon I had met him by chance in the region of Broadway between Forty-second Street and Columbus Circle. I can still recall the shy, half-frightened pleasure in his face as he saw me advancing toward him. He might have been a young girl. “Got somethin’ awful good, sonny, to let ye in on,” were the words with which he stopped me. I turned round and walked back with him to the Circle, and round it. “No, Lovey,” I said decidedly, when we had got to the corner of the Park, “it’s not good enough. I’ve other fish to fry.” A hectic flush stole into the cheeks, which kept a marvelous youth and freshness. The thin, delicate features, ascetic rather than degraded, sharpened with a frosty look of disappointment. “Well, just as you think best, sonny,” he said, resignedly. He asked, abruptly, however, “When did ye have yer last meal?” “The day before yesterday.” “And when d’ye expect to have yer next?” “Oh, I don’t know. Sometime; possibly to-night.” “Possibly to-night— ’Ow?” “I tell you I don’t know. Something will happen. If it doesn’t—well, I’ll manage.” He had found an opening. “Don’t ye see ye carn’t go on like that? Ye’ve got to live.” “Oh no, I haven’t.” “Don’t say that, sonny,” he burst out, tenderly. “Ye’ve got to live! Ye must do it—for my sake—now. I suppose it’s because we’re—we’re Britishers together.” He looked round on the circling crowd of Slavs, Mongolians, Greeks, Italians, aliens of all sorts. “We’re different from these Yankees, ain’t we?” Admitting our Anglo-Saxon superiority, I was about to say, “Well, so long, Lovey,” and shake him off, when he put in, piteously, “I suppose I can come up and lay down on yer floor again to-night?” “I wish you could, Lovey,” I responded. “But—but the fact is I—I haven’t got that place any more.” “Fired?” I nodded. “Where’ve ye gone?” “Nowhere.” “Where did ye sleep last night?” I described the exact spot in the lumber-yard near Greeley’s Slip. He knew it. He had made use of its hospitality himself on warm summer nights such as we were having. “Goin’ there again to-night?” I said I didn’t know. He gazed at me with a kind of timid daring. “You wouldn’t be—you wouldn’t be goin’ to the Down and Out Club?” I smiled. “Why should you ask me that?”