’It is very noble of you, Maud—­it is angelic; your sympathy with a ruined and despairing old man.  But I fear you will recoil.  I tell you frankly that less than twenty thousand pounds will not extricate me from the quag of ruin in which I am entangled—­lost!’

‘Recoil!  Far from it.  I’ll do it.  There must be some way.’

’Enough, my fair young protectress—­celestial enthusiast, enough.  Though you do not, yet I recoil.  I could not bring myself to accept this sacrifice.  What signifies, even to me, my extrication?  I lie a mangled wretch, with fifty mortal wounds on my crown; what avails the healing of one wound, when there are so many beyond all cure?  Better to let me perish where I fall; and reserve your money for the worthier objects whom, perhaps, hereafter may avail to save.’

’But I will do this.  I must.  I cannot see you suffer with the power in my hands unemployed to help you,’ I exclaimed.

’Enough, dear Maud; the will is here—­enough:  there is balm in your compassion and good-will.  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.

The narrative told, that on her return homeward with her marketing, she had been chased by wolves, and barely escaped by flying at her utmost speed, from time to time retarding, as she did so, the pursuit, by throwing, piece by piece, the contents of her basket, in her wake, to be devoured and fought for by the famished beasts of prey.

This print had seized my imagination.  I looked with a curious interest on the print:  something in the disposition of the trees, their great height, and rude boughs, interlacing, and the awful shadow beneath, reminded me of a portion of the Windmill Wood where Milly and I had often rambled.  Then I looked at the figure of the poor girl, flying for her life, and glancing terrified over her shoulder.