ted from him at his death; of course his demise
cancelled the engagement. He had been the friend of personages
implicated. He knew. I suspect he apprehended the unpleasant position of
a witness.'

'But what was the stipulation you presume was implied?' said I.

'Something that passed between lawyers: I am not bound to be cognizant of
it. Abandon my claims for a few thousands? Not for ten, not for ten
hundred times the sum!'

To be free from his boisterous influence, which made my judgement as
unsteady as the weather-glass in a hurricane, I left my house and went
straight to Dettermain and Newson, who astonished me quite as much by
assuring me that the payment of the money was a fact. There was no
mystery about it. The intelligence and transfer papers, they said, had
not been communicated to them by the firm they were opposed to, but by a
solicitor largely connected with the aristocracy; and his letter had
briefly declared the unknown donator's request that legal proceedings
should forthwith be stopped. They offered no opinion of their own.
Suggestions of any kind, they seemed to think, had weight, and all of
them an equal weight, to conclude from the value they assigned to every
idea of mine. The name of the solicitor in question was Charles Adolphus
Bannerbridge. It was, indeed, my old, one of my oldest friends; the same
by whom I had been led to a feast and an evening of fun when a little
fellow starting in the London streets. Sure of learning the whole truth
from old Mr. Bannerbridge, I walked to his office and heard that he had
suddenly been taken ill. I strode on to his house, and entered a house of
mourning. The kind old man, remembered by me so vividly, had died
overnight. Miss Bannerbridge perceived that I had come on an errand, and
with her gentle good breeding led me to speak of it. She knew nothing
whatever of the sum of money. She was, however, aware that an annuity had
been regularly paid through the intervention of her father. I was
referred by her to a Mr. Richards, his recently-established partner. This
gentleman was ignorant of the whole transaction.

Throughout the day I strove to combat the pressure of evidence in favour
of the idea that an acknowledgement of special claims had been wrested
from the enemy. Temple hardly helped me, though his solid sense was dead
against the notions entertained by my father and Jorian DeWitt, and
others besides, our elders. The payment of the sum through the same
c