closing
sentences of the narrative, as his memory gave them back to him, one by
one, in these words:

"Despise my dying conviction if you will, but grant me, I solemnly
implore you, one last request. My son! the only hope I have left for
you hangs on a great doubt--the doubt whether we are, or are not,
the masters of our own destinies. It may be that mortal free-will can
conquer mortal fate; and that going, as we all do, inevitably to death,
we go inevitably to nothing that is before death. If this be so, indeed,
respect--though you respect nothing else--the warning which I give you
from my grave. Never, to your dying day, let any living soul approach
you who is associated, directly or indirectly, with the crime which your
father has committed. Avoid the widow of the man I killed--if the widow
still lives. Avoid the maid whose wicked hand smoothed the way to the
marriage--if the maid is still in her service. And more than all,
avoid the man who bears the same name as your own. Offend your best
benefactor, if that benefactor's influence has connected you one with
the other. Desert the woman who loves you, if that woman is a link
between you and him. Hide yourself from him under an assumed name. Put
the mountains and the seas between you; be ungrateful, be unforgiving;
be all that is most repellent to your own gentler nature, rather than
live under the same roof, and breathe the same air, with that man. Never
let the two Allan Armadales meet in this world: never, never, never!

"There lies the way by which you may escape--if any way there be. Take
it, if you prize your own innocence and your own happiness, through all
your life to come!

"I have done. If I could have trusted any weaker influence than the
influence of this confession to incline you to my will, I would have
spared you the disclosure which these pages contain. You are lying on my
breast, sleeping the innocent sleep of a child, while a stranger's hand
writes these words for you as they fall from my lips. Think what the
strength of my conviction must be, when I can find the courage, on my
death-bed, to darken all your young life at its outset with the shadow
of your father's crime. Think, and be warned. Think, and forgive me if
you can."

There it ended. Those were the father's last words to the son.

Inexorably faithful to his forced duty, Mr. Neal laid aside the pen, and
read over aloud the lines he had just written. "Is there more to add?"
he ask