'I proceed. The money is useful to you, so I rejoice at it.'

Five and twenty thousand pounds was the amount.

'No stipulation was attached to it?'

'None. Of course a stipulation was implied: but of that I am not bound
to be cognizant.'

'Absurd!' I cried: 'it can't have come from the quarter you suspect.'

'Where else?' he asked.

I thought of the squire, Lady Edbury, my aunt, Lady Sampleman, Anna
Penrhys, some one or other of his frantic female admirers. But the
largeness of the amount, and the channel selected for the payment,
precluded the notion that any single person had come to succour him in
his imminent need, and, as it chanced, mine.

Observing that my speculations wavered, he cited numerous instances in
his life of the special action of Providence in his favour, and was bold
enough to speak of a star, which his natural acuteness would have checked
his doing before me, if his imagination had not been seriously struck.

'You hand the money over to me, sir?' I said.

'Without a moment of hesitation, my dear boy,' he melted me by answering.

'You believe you have received a bribe?'