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.