Andrew Brewster had just come home after an all-night’s search, and he was in his bedroom in the bitter sleep of utter exhaustion and despair.  Suddenly his heart had failed him and his brain had reeled.  He had begun to feel dazed, to forget for a minute what he was looking for.  He had made incoherent replies to the men with him, and finally one, after a whispered consultation with the others, had said:  “Look at here, Andrew, old fellow; you’d better go home and rest a bit.  We’ll look all the harder while you’re gone, and maybe she’ll be found when you wake up.”

“Who will be found?” Andrew asked, with a dazed look.  He reeled as if he were drunk.

“Ain’t had anything, has he?” one of the men whispered.

“Not a drop to my knowledge.”

Andrew’s lips trembled perceptibly; his forehead was knitted with vacuous perplexity; his eyes reflected blanks of unreason; his whole body had an effect of weak settling and subsidence.  The man who worked next to him in the cutting-room at Lloyd’s, and had searched at his side indefatigably from the first, stole a tender hand under his shoulder.  “Come along with me, old man,” he said, and Andrew obeyed.

When Fanny and Eva came in with the child, he lay prostrate on the bed, and scarcely seemed to breathe.  A great qualm of fear shot over Fanny for a second.  His father had died of heart-disease.

“Is he—­dead?” she gasped to Eva.

“No, of course he ain’t,” said Eva.  “He’s asleep; he’s wore out.  Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, wake up!  She’s found, Andrew; Ellen’s found.”  But Andrew did not stir.

“He is!” gasped Fanny, again.

“No, he ain’t.  Andrew, Andrew Brewster, wake up, wake up!  Ellen’s here!  She’s found!”

Fanny put Ellen down, and bent over Andrew and listened.  “No, I can hear him breathe,” she cried.  Then she kissed him, and leaned her mouth close to his ear.  “Andrew!” she said, in a voice which Eva and Ellen had never heard before.  “Andrew, poor old man, wake up; she’s found!  Our child is found!”

When Andrew still did not wake, but only stirred, and moaned faintly, Fanny lifted Ellen onto the bed.  “Kiss poor father, and wake him,” she told her.

Ellen, whose blue eyes were big with fright and wonder, whose lips were quivering, and whose little body was vibrating with the strain of her nerves, laid her soft cheek against her father’s rough, pale one, and stole a little arm under his neck.  “Father, wake up!” she called out in her little, trembling, sweet voice, and that reached Andrew Brewster in the depths of his own physical inertness.  He opened his eyes and looked at the child, and the light came into them, and then the sound of his sobbing filled the house and reached the people out in the yard, and an echo arose from them.  Gradually the crowd dispersed.  Jim Tenny, before he drove away, went to the door and spoke to Eva.

“Anything I can do?” he asked, with a curious, tender roughness.  He did not look at her as he spoke.