With this explanation I
left it to Mrs. Clements to say whether our interest in the matter
(whatever difference there might be in the motives which actuated us)
was not the same, and whether she felt any reluctance to forward my
object by giving me such information on the subject of my inquiries as
she happened to possess.

The poor woman was at first too much confused and agitated to
understand thoroughly what I said to her. She could only reply that I
was welcome to anything she could tell me in return for the kindness I
had shown to Anne; but as she was not very quick and ready, at the best
of times, in talking to strangers, she would beg me to put her in the
right way, and to say where I wished her to begin.

Knowing by experience that the plainest narrative attainable from
persons who are not accustomed to arrange their ideas, is the narrative
which goes far enough back at the beginning to avoid all impediments of
retrospection in its course, I asked Mrs. Clements to tell me first
what had happened after she had left Limmeridge, and so, by watchful
questioning, carried her on from point to point, till we reached the
period of Anne's disappearance.

The substance of the information which I thus obtained was as follows:--

On leaving the farm at Todd's Corner, Mrs. Clements and Anne had
travelled that day as far as Derby, and had remained there a week on
Anne's account. They had then gone on to London, and had lived in the
lodging occupied by Mrs. Clements at that time for a month or more,
when circumstances connected with the house and the landlord had
obliged them to change their quarters. Anne's terror of being
discovered in London or its neighbourhood, whenever they ventured to
walk out, had gradually communicated itself to Mrs. Clements, and she
had determined on removing to one of the most out-of-the-way places in
England--to the town of Grimsby in Lincolnshire, where her deceased
husband had passed all his early life. His relatives were respectable
people settled in the town--they had always treated Mrs. Clements with
great kindness, and she thought it impossible to do better than go
there and take the advice of her husband's friends. Anne would not
hear of returning to her mother at Welmingham, because she had been
removed to the Asylum from that place, and because Sir Percival would
be certain to go back there and find her again. There was serious
weight in this objection, and Mrs. Clements felt t