looked
upon as an usurpation. 'Bridget Fitzgerald,' he said, 'had been
faithful to the fortunes of his sister--had followed her abroad, and to
England when Mrs. Starkey had thought fit to return. Both her sister
and her husband were dead; he knew nothing of Bridget Fitzgerald at the
present time: probably Sir Philip Tempest, his nephew's guardian, might
be able to give me some information.' I have not given the little
contemptuous terms; the way in which faithful service was meant to
imply more than it said--all that has nothing to do with my story. Sir
Philip, when applied to, told me that he paid an annuity regularly to
an old woman named Fitzgerald, living at Coldholme (the village near
Starkey Manor-House). Whether she had any descendants he could not say.

One bleak March evening, I came in sight of the places described at the
beginning of my story. I could hardly understand the rude dialect in
which the direction to old Bridget's house was given.

'Yo' see yon furleets,' all run together, gave me no idea that I was to
guide myself by the distant lights that shone in the windows of the
Hall, occupied for the time by a farmer who held the post of steward,
while the Squire, now four or five and twenty, was making the grand
tour. However, at last, I reached Bridget's cottage--a low, moss-grown
place; the palings that had once surrounded it were broken and gone;
and the underwood of the forest came up to the walls, and must have
darkened the windows. It was about seven o'clock--not late to my London
notions--but, after knocking for some time at the door and receiving no
reply, I was driven to conjecture that the occupant of the house was
gone to bed. So I betook myself to the nearest church I had seen, three
miles back on the road I had come, sure that close to that I should
find an inn of some kind; and early the next morning I set off back to
Coldholme, by a field-path which my host assured me I should find a
shorter cut than the road I had taken the night before. It was a cold,
sharp morning; my feet left prints in the sprinkling of hoar-frost that
covered the ground; nevertheless, I saw an old woman, whom I
instinctively suspected to be the object of my search, in a sheltered
covert on one side of my path. I lingered and watched her. She must
have been considerably above the middle size in her prime, for when she
raised herself from the stooping position in which I first saw her,
there was something fine and comma