dangerous illness; and for the last ten days I have been suffering under
a relapse. I am now better again, and able to enter on the business
which you so kindly offer to undertake for me.

"The person whose present place of abode it is of the utmost importance
to me to discover is Mr. Noel Vanstone. I have lived, for many years
past, in this gentleman's service as house-keeper; and not having
received my formal dismissal, I consider myself in his service
still. During my absence on the Continent he was privately married
at Aldborough, in Suffolk, on the eighteenth of August last. He left
Aldborough the same day, taking his wife with him to some place of
retreat which was kept a secret from everybody except his lawyer, Mr.
Loscombe, of Lincoln's Inn. After a short time he again removed, on the
4th of September, without informing Mr. Loscombe, on this occasion, of
his new place of abode. From that date to this the lawyer has remained
(or has pretended to remain) in total ignorance of where he now is.
Application has been made to Mr. Loscombe, under the circumstances, to
mention what that former place of residence was, of which Mr. Vanstone
is known to have informed him. Mr. Loscombe has declined acceding to
this request, for want of formal permission to disclose his client's
proceedings after leaving Aldborough. I have all these latter
particulars from Mr. Loscombe's correspondent--the nephew of the
gentleman who owns this house, and whose charity has given me an asylum,
during the heavy affliction of my sickness, under his own roof.

"I believe the reasons which have induced Mr. Noel Vanstone to keep
himself and his wife in hiding are reasons which relate entirely to
myself. In the first p lace, he is aware that the circumstances under
which he has married are such as to give me the right of regarding him
with a just indignation. In the second place, he knows that my faithful
services, rendered through a period of twenty years, to his father and
to himself, forbid him, in common decency, to cast me out helpless on
the world without a provision for the end of my life. He is the meanest
of living men, and his wife is the vilest of living women. As long as
he can avoid fulfilling his obligations to me, he will; and his wife's
encouragement may be trusted to fortify him in his ingratitude.

"My object in determining to find him out is briefly this. His marriage
has exposed him to consequences which a man of ten times his c