ide, "Let me come in."

After an instant's pause to steady his nerves, Mr. Brock opened the
door, and found himself, at one o'clock in the morning, standing face to
face on the threshold of his own bedroom with Ozias Midwinter.

"Are you ill?" asked the rector, as soon as his astonishment would allow
him to speak.

"I have come here to make a clean breast of it!" was the strange answer.
"Will you let me in?"

With those words he walked into the room, his eyes on the ground, his
lips ashy pale, and his hand holding something hidden behind him.

"I saw the light under your door," he went on, without looking up, and
without moving his hand, "and I know the trouble on your mind which is
keeping you from your rest. You are going away to-morrow morning, and
you don't like leaving Mr. Armadale alone with a stranger like me."

Startled as he was, Mr. Brock saw the serious necessity of being plain
with a man who had come at that time, and had said those words to him.

"You have guessed right," he answered. "I stand in the place of a father
to Allan Armadale, and I am naturally unwilling to leave him, at his
age, with a man whom I don't know."

Ozias Midwinter took a step forward to the table. His wandering eyes
rested on the rector's New Testament, which was one of the objects lying
on it.

"You have read that Book, in the years of a long life, to many
congregations," he said. "Has it taught you mercy to your miserable
fellow-creatures?"

Without waiting to be answered, he looked Mr. Brock in the face for the
first time, and brought his hidden hand slowly into view.

"Read that," he said; "and, for Christ's sake, pity me when you know who
I am."

He laid a letter of many pages on the table. It was the letter that Mr.
Neal had posted at Wildbad nineteen years since.

II. THE MAN REVEALED.

THE first cool breathings of the coming dawn fluttered through the open
window as Mr. Brock read the closing lines of the Confession. He put it
from him in silence, without looking up. The first shock of discovery
had struck his mind, and had passed away again. At his age, and with
his habits of thought, his grasp was not strong enough to hold the whole
revelation that had fallen on him. All his heart, when he closed the
manuscript, was with the memory of the woman who had been the beloved
friend of his later and happier life; all his thoughts were busy with
the miserable secret of her treason to her own father which the