from
want of capacity to understand them. His temperament, it could not be
denied, was heedless to the last degree: he acted recklessly on his
first impulses, and rushed blindfold at all his conclusions. On the
other hand, it was to be said in his favor that his disposition was open
as the day; a more generous, affectionate, sweet-tempered lad it
would have been hard to find anywhere. A certain quaint originality of
character, and a natural healthiness in all his tastes, carried him
free of most of the dangers to which his mother's system of education
inevitably exposed him. He had a thoroughly English love of the sea and
of all that belongs to it; and as he grew in years, there was no
luring him away from the water-side, and no keeping him out of the
boat-builder's yard. In course of time his mother caught him actually
working there, to her infinite annoyance and surprise, as a volunteer.
He acknowledged that his whole future ambition was to have a yard of his
own, and that his one present object was to learn to build a boat for
himself. Wisely foreseeing that such a pursuit as this for his leisure
hours was exactly what was wanted to reconcile the lad to a position of
isolation from companions of his own rank and age, Mr. Brock prevailed
on Mrs. Armadale, with no small difficulty, to let her son have his
way. At the period of that second event in the clergyman's life with
his pupil which is now to be related, young Armadale had practiced long
enough in the builder's yard to have reached the summit of his wishes,
by laying with his own hands the keel of his own boat.

Late on a certain summer day, not long after Allan had completed his
sixteenth year, Mr. Brock left his pupil hard at work in the yard,
and went to spend the evening with Mrs. Armadale, taking the _Times_
newspaper with him in his hand.

The years that had passed since they had first met had long since
regulated the lives of the clergyman and his neighbor. The first
advances which Mr. Brock's growing admiration for the widow had led him
to make in the early days of their intercourse had been met on her
side by an appeal to his forbearance which had closed his lips for the
future. She had satisfied him, at once and forever, that the one place
in her heart which he could hope to occupy was the place of a friend.
He loved her well enough to take what she would give him: friends they
became, and friends they remained from that time forth. No jealous
dread