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
channel which supplied the annuity, pointed distinctly to an admission
of a claim, he inclined to think, and should be supposed to come from
a personage having cause either to fear him or to assist him. He set my
speculations astray by hinting that the request for the stopping of
the case might be a blind. A gift of money, he said shrewdly, was
a singularly weak method of inducing a man to stop the suit of a
life-time. I thought of Lady Edbury; but her income was limited, and
her expenditure was not of Lady Sampleman, but it was notorious that she
loved her purse as well as my aunt Dorothy, and was even more, in the
squire's phrase, 'a petticoated parsimony.' Anna Penrhys appeared the
likelier, except for the fact that the commencement of the annuity was
long before our acquaintance with her. I tried her on the subject.
Her amazement was without a shadow of reserve. 'It 's Welsh, it's not
English,' she remarked. I knew no Welshwoman save Anna.

'Do you know the whole of his history?' said she. Possibly one of the
dozen unknown episodes in it might have furnished the clue, I agreed
with her.

The sight of twenty-one thousand pounds placed to my credit in the Fu