Leave me, ministering angel; for the present I
cannot. If you _will_, we can talk of it again. Good-night.'
And so we parted.
The attorney from Feltram, I afterwards heard, was with him nearly all that
night, trying in vain to devise by their joint ingenuity any means by which
I might tie myself up. But there were none. I could not bind myself.
I was myself full of the hope of helping him. What was this sum to me,
great as it seemed? Truly nothing. I could have spared it, and never felt
the loss.
I took up a large quarto with coloured prints, one of the few books I had
brought with me from dear old Knowl. Too much excited to hope for sleep in
bed, I opened it, and turned over the leaves, my mind still full of Uncle
Silas and the sum I hoped to help him with.
Unaccountably one of those coloured engravings arrested my attention.
It represented the solemn solitude of a lofty forest; a girl, in Swiss
costume, was flying in terror, and as she fled flinging a piece of meat
behind her which she had taken from a little market-basket hanging upon her
arm. Through the glade a pack of wolves were pursuing her.
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