side of his bed,
and applied his mind to consider next whether the emergency itself was
as serious as he had hitherto been inclined to think it. Following this
new way out of his perplexities, Mr. Brock found himself unexpectedly
traveling to the end in view by the least inspiriting of all human
journeys--a journey through the past years of his own life.

One by one the events of those years--all connected with the same little
group of characters, and all more or less answerable for the anxiety
which was now intruding itself between the clergyman and his night's
rest--rose, in progressive series, on Mr. Brock's memory. The first of
the series took him back, through a period of fourteen years, to his own
rectory on the Somersetshire shores of the Bristol Channel, and closeted
him at a private interview with a lady who had paid him a visit in the
character of a total stranger to the parson and the place.

The lady's complexion was fair, the lady's figure was well preserved;
she was still a young woman, and she looked even younger than her age.
There was a shade of melancholy in her expression, and an undertone of
suffering in her voice--enough, in each case, to indicate that she had
known trouble, but not enough to obtrude that trouble on the notice of
others. She brought with her a fine, fair-haired boy of eight years old,
whom she presented as her son, and who was sent out of the way, at the
beginning of the interview, to amuse himself in the rectory garden. Her
card had preceded her entrance into the study, and had announced her
under the name of "Mrs. Armadale." Mr. Brock began to feel interested in
her before she had opened her lips; and when the son had been dismissed,
he awaited with some anxiety to hear what the mother had to say to him.

Mrs. Armadale began by informing the rector that she was a widow. Her
husband had perished by shipwreck a short time after their union, on the
voyage from Madeira to Lisbon. She had been brought to England,
after her affliction, under her father's protection; and her child--a
posthumous son--had been born on the family estate in Norfolk. Her
father's death, shortly afterward, had deprived her of her only
surviving parent, and had exposed her to neglect and misconstruction on
the part of her remaining relatives (two brothers), which had estranged
her from them, she feared, for the rest of her days. For some time past
she had lived in the neighboring county of Devonshire, devot