‘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?’

’That is my entire belief—­the sole conclusion I can arrive at.  I will tell you, Richie:  the old Marquis of Edbury once placed five thousand pounds to my account on a proviso that I should—­neglect, is the better word, my Case.  I inherited from him at his death; of course his demise cancelled the engagement.  He had been the friend of personages implicated.  He knew.  I suspect he apprehended the unpleasant position of a witness.’

‘But what was the stipulation you presume was implied?’ said I.

’Something that passed between lawyers:  I am not bound to be cognizant of it.  Abandon my claims for a few thousands?  Not for ten, not for ten hundred times the sum!’

To be free from his boisterous influence, which made my judgement as unsteady as the weather-glass in a hurricane, I left my house and went straight to Dettermain and Newson, who astonished me quite as much by assuring me that the payment of the money was a fact.  There was no mystery about it.  The intelligence and transfer papers, they said, had not been communicated to them by the firm they were opposed to, but by a solicitor largely connected with the aristocracy; and his letter had briefly declared the unknown donator’s request that legal proceedings should forthwith be stopped.  They offered no opinion of their own.  Suggestions of any kind, they seemed to think, had weight, and all of them an equal weight, to conclude from the value 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