Then I found that through all
those years of narrowed means she had contrived to scrape and save a
little money--sufficient, as it afterward proved, to see me through the
examinations for entrance to my profession, with the generous assistance
of my father's old legal advisers, who gave me my articles, and who have
all along treated me with extreme kindness.
"For most of the succeeding years my life does not concern the matter in
hand. I was a lawyer's clerk in my benefactors' service, and afterward a
qualified man among their assistants. All through the firm were careful,
in pursuance of my poor mother's wishes, that I should not learn the name
or whereabouts of the man who had wrecked her life and my father's. I
first met the man himself at the Clifton Club, where I had gone with an
acquaintance who was a member. It was not till afterward that I understood
his curious awkwardness on that occasion. A week later I called (as I had
frequently done) at the building in which your office is situated, on
business with a solicitor who has an office on the floor above your own.
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