I’ve really been enjoying George Eliot’s Silas Marner. This short excerpt portrays the change which occurs in Silas Marner when his idolized gold is stolen. It uses a visit from someone bringing him some food as a way to deliver that portrait. The explanatory additions in square brackets are mine.
“They [Mrs. Winthrop and her son Aaron] had to knock loudly before Silas heard them; but when he did come to the door he showed no impatience, as he would once have done, at a visit that had been unasked for and unexpected. Formerly, his heart had been a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken. Left groping in darkness, with his prop [the gold he had previously stashed up, which was recently stolen] utterly gone, Silas had inevitably a sense, though a dull and a half despairing one, that if any help came to him it must come from without”