ength to travel,
and that her own medical attendant might restore her all the more
speedily to herself if he were assisted by the best professional advice.
Having overcome her habitual reluctance to seeing strangers by this
means, the rector at once went to Allan; and, delicately concealing what
Mrs. Armadale had said at the interview, broke the news to him that his
mother was seriously ill. Allan would hear of no messengers being sent
for assistance: he drove off on the spot to the railway, and telegraphed
himself to Bristol for medical help.

On the next morning the help came, and Mr. Brock's worst fears were
confirmed. The village surgeon had fatally misunderstood the case from
the first, and the time was past now at which his errors of treatment
might have been set right. The shock of the previous morning had
completed the mischief. Mrs. Armadale's days were numbered.

The son who dearly loved her, the old friend to whom her life was
precious, hoped vainly to the last. In a month from the physician's
visit all hope was over; and Allan shed the first bitter tears of his
life at his mother's grave.

She had died more peacefully than Mr. Brock had dared to hope, leaving
all her little fortune to her son, and committing him solemnly to the
care of her one friend on earth. The rector had entreated her to let him
write and try to reconcile her brothers with her before it was too
late. She had only answered sadly that it was too late already. But one
reference escaped her in her last illness to those early sorrows which
had weighed heavily on all her after-life, and which had passed thrice
already, like shadows of evil, between the rector and herself. Even on
her deathbed she had shrunk from letting the light fall clearly on the
story of the past. She had looked at Allan kneeling by the bedside,
and had whispered to Mr. Brock: "_Never let his Namesake come near him!
Never let that Woman find him out_!" No word more fell from her that
touched on the misfortunes which had tried her in the past, or on the
dangers which she dreaded in the future. The secret which she had kept
from her son and from her friend was a secret which she carried with her
to the grave.

When the last offices of affection and respect had been performed, Mr.
Brock felt it his duty, as executor to the deceased lady, to write to
her brothers, and to give them information of her death. Believing that
he had to deal with two men who would probably misin