Immediately after breakfast she dressed herself to go out, intending to visit the Home for reforming inebriates and learn something of Mr. Ridley.  Just as she came down stairs a servant opened the street door, and she saw the slender figure of Ethel.

“My poor child!” she said, with great kindness of manner, taking her by the hand and drawing her in.  “You are frightened about your father.”

“Oh yes, ma’am,” replied Ethel, with quivering lips.  “He didn’t come home all night, and I’m so scared about him.  I don’t know what to do.  Maybe you’ll think it wrong in me to trouble you about it, but I am in such distress, and don’t know where to go.

“No, not wrong, my child, and I’m glad you’ve come.  I ought to have sent you word about him.”

“My father!  Oh, ma’am, do you know where he is?”

“Yes; he came here last night sick, and I took him in my carriage to a Home for just such as he is, where he will be kindly taken care of until he gets well.”

Ethel’s large brown eyes were fixed in a kind of thankful wonder on the face of Mrs. Birtwell.  She could not speak.  She did not even try to put thought or feeling into words.  She only took the hand of Mrs. Birtwell, and after touching it with her lips laid her wet cheek against it and held it there tightly.

“Can I go and see him?” she asked, lifting her face after some moments.

“It will not be best, I think,” replied Mrs. Birtwell—­“that is, not now.  He was very sick when we took him there, and may not be well enough to be seen this morning.”

“Very sick!  Oh, ma’am!” The face of Ethel grew white and her lips trembled.

“Not dangerously,” said Mrs. Birtwell, “but yet quite ill.  I am going now to see him; and if you will come here in a couple of hours, when I shall return home—­”

“Oh. ma’am, let me go along with you,” broke in Ethel.  “I won’t ask to see him if it isn’t thought best, but I’ll know how he is without waiting so long.”

The fear that Mr. Ridley might die in his delirium had troubled Mrs. Birtwell all night, and it still oppressed her.  She would have much preferred to go alone and learn first the good or ill of the case, but Ethel begged so hard to be permitted to accompany her that she could not persist in objection.

On reaching the Home, Mrs. Birtwell found in the office the man in whose care Mr. Ridley had been placed.  Remembering what Mr. G——­had said of this man, a fresh hope for Ethel’s father sprang up in her soul as she looked into his clear eyes and saw his firm mouth and air of conscious poise and strength.  She did not see in his manly face a single scar from the old battle out of which he had come at last victorious.  Recognizing her, he called her by name, and not waiting for her to ask the question that looked out of her face, said: 

“It is all right with him.”

A cry of joy that she could not repress broke from Ethel.  It was followed by sobbing and tears.