Open it
and you will find a bundle of documents tied together with a blue
ribbon, take them. All through my illness I trembled at the thought that
they might ransack my things and find them, and when I came to myself I
was worrying myself with the idea that I might perhaps have spoken about
these papers in my delirium. Oh! it would have been frightful if my
relations had seized them. Take them, quickly, before Clementina
returns. I must conceal everything, even from her."
Margari accomplished the task with tolerable dexterity. He only broke
the looking-glass while he was opening the casket, and that was little
enough for him. There the documents were right enough, nicely tied
together.
And then Henrietta seized his hand and pressed it so warmly and looked
at him with her lovely, piteous, imploring eyes--a very lunatic might
have been healed by such a look.
"I know you for an honourable man," continued she, "promise me not to
look at these papers, but give them to my brother Koloman, he will know
what to do with them. You will do this for my sake, dear Margari, will
you not? It is just as though one of the dead were to come back to you
from the world beyond the grave and implore you, with desperate
supplications, to free its soul from a thought which rested upon it like
a curse and would not let it rest in the grave."
Margari shuddered at these words.
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