“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.  His joy at seeing his daughter safe overcame the surprise with which he would at another time have beheld her hanging as familiarly on the arm of a stranger as she might have done upon his own.

“Lucy, my dear Lucy, are you safe?—­are you well?” were the only words that broke from him as he embraced her in ecstasy.

“I am well, sir, thank God! and still more that I see you so; but this gentleman,” she said, quitting his arm and shrinking from him, “what must he think of me?” and her eloquent blood, flushing over neck and brow, spoke how much she was ashamed of the freedom with which she had craved, and even compelled, his assistance.

“This gentleman,” said Sir William Ashton, “will, I trust, not regret the trouble we have given him, when I assure him of the gratitude of the Lord Keeper for the greatest service which one man ever rendered to another—­for the life of my child—­for my own life, which he has saved by his bravery and presence of mind.  He will, I am sure, permit us to request——­” “Request nothing of me, my lord,” said the stranger, in a stern and peremptory tone; “I am the Master of Ravenswood.”

There was a dead pause of surprise, not unmixed with less pleasant feelings.  The Master wrapt himself in his cloak, made a haughty inclination toward Lucy, muttering a few words of courtesy, as indistinctly heard as they seemed to be reluctantly uttered, and, turning from them, was immediately lost in the thicket.

“The Master of Ravenswood!” said the Lord Keeper, when he had recovered his momentary astonishment.  “Hasten after him—­stop him—­beg him to speak to me for a single moment.”

The two foresters accordingly set off in pursuit of the stranger.  They speedily reappeared, and, in an embarrassed and awkward manner, said the gentleman would not return.