CHAPTER XXI.
MR. ELLIOTT still sat in a kind of helpless maze when his servant came in with the card of Mrs. Spencer Birtwell. He read the name almost with a start. Nothing, it seemed to him, could have been more inopportune, for now he remembered with painful distinctness that it was at the party given by Mr. and Mrs. Birtwell that Ridley had yielded to temptation and fallen, never, he feared, to rise again.
Mrs. Birtwell met him with a very serious aspect.
"I am in trouble," was the first sentence that passed her lips as she took the clergyman's hand and looked into his sober countenance.
"About what?" asked Mr. Elliott.
They sat down, regarding each other earnestly.
"Mr. Elliott," said the lady, with solemn impressiveness, "it is an awful thing to feel that through your act a soul may be lost."
Mrs. Birtwell saw the light go out of her minister's face and a look of pain sweep over it.
"An awful thing indeed," he returned, in a voice that betrayed the agitation from which he was still suffering.
"I want to talk with you about a matter that distresses me deeply," said Mrs. Birtwell, wondering as she spoke at Mr. Elliott's singular betrayal of feeling.