Yet there was a necessity to speak, or at last she thought so, and in a fluttered accent she began to mention her wonderful escape, in which she was sure that the stranger must, under Heaven, have been her father's protector and her own.
He seemed to shrink from her expressions of gratitude, while he replied abruptly, "I leave you, madam," the deep melody of his voice rendered powerful, but not harsh, by something like a severity of tone--"I leave you to the protection of those to whom it is possible you may have this day been a guardian angel." Lucy was surprised at the ambiguity of his language, and, with a feeling of artless and unaffected gratitude, began to deprecate the idea of having intended to give her deliverer any offence, as if such a thing had been possible.

"I have been unfortunate," she said, "in endeavouring to express my thanks--I am sure it must be so, though I cannot recollect what I said; but would you but stay till my father--till the Lord Keeper comes; would you only permit him to pay you his thanks, and to inquire your name ?" "My name is unnecessary," answered the stranger; "your father--I would rather say Sir William Ashton--will learn it soon enough, for all the pleasure it is likely to afford him." "You mistake him," said Lucy, earnestly; "he will be grateful for my sake and for his own.

You do not know my father, or you are deceiving me with a story of his safety, when he has already fallen a victim to the fury of that animal." When she had caught this idea, she started from the ground and endeavoured to press towards the avenue in which the accident had taken place, while the stranger, though he seemed to hesitate between the desire to assist and the wish to leave her, was obliged, in common humanity, to oppose her both by entreaty and action.
"On the word of a gentleman, madam, I tell you the truth; your father is in perfect safety; you will expose yourself to injury if you venture back where the herd of wild cattle grazed.

If you will go"-- for, having once adopted the idea that her father was still in danger, she pressed forward in spite of him--"if you WILL go, accept my arm, though I am not perhaps the person who can with most propriety offer you support." But, without heeding this intimation, Lucy took him at his word.

"Oh, if you be a man," she said--"if you be a gentleman, assist me to find my father! You shall not leave me--you must go with me; he is dying perhaps while we are talking here!" Then, without listening to excuse or apology, and holding fast by the stranger's arm, though unconscious of anything save the support which it gave, and without which she could not have moved, mixed with a vague feeling of preventing his escape from her, she was urging, and almost dragging, him forward when Sir William Ashton came up, followed by the female attendant of blind Alice, and by two woodcutters, whom he had summoned from their occupation to his assistance.