mixture of confusion and alarm; she looked an older woman than she was,
by ten good years at least.

"The name is so very uncommon," said Mr. Brock, imagining he had
offended her, and trying to excuse himself. "It really seemed impossible
there could be two persons--"

"There _are_ two," interposed Mrs. Armadale. "Allan, as you know, is
sixteen years old. If you look back at the advertisement, you will find
the missing person described as being only fifteen. Although he bears
the same surname and the same Christian name, he is, I thank God, in no
way whatever related to my son. As long as I live, it will be the object
of my hopes and prayers that Allan may never see him, may never even
hear of him. My kind friend, I see I surprise you: will you bear with
me if I leave these strange circumstances unexplained? There is past
misfortune and misery in my early life too painful for me to speak of,
even to _you_. Will you help me to bear the remembrance of it, by never
referring to this again? Will you do even more--will you promise not to
speak of it to Allan, and not to let that newspaper fall in his way?"

Mr. Brock gave the pledge required of him, and considerately left her to
herself.

The rector had been too long and too truly attached to Mrs. Armadale to
be capable of regarding her with any unworthy distrust. But it would be
idle to deny that he felt disappointed by her want of confidence in him,
and that he looked inquisitively at the advertisement more than once on
his way back to his own house.

It was clear enough, now, that Mrs. Armadale's motives for burying her
son as well as herself in the seclusion of a remote country village was
not so much to keep him under her own eye as to keep him from discovery
by his namesake. Why did she dread the idea of their ever meeting? Was
it a dread for herself, or a dread for her son? Mr. Brock's loyal belief
in his friend rejected any solution of the difficulty which pointed at
some past misconduct of Mrs. Armadale's. That night he destroyed the
advertisement with his own hand; that night he resolved that the subject
should never be suffered to enter his mind again. There was another
Allan Armadale about the world, a stranger to his pupil's blood, and
a vagabond advertised in the public newspapers. So much accident had
revealed to him. More, for Mrs. Armadale's sake, he had no wish to
discover--and more he would never seek to know.

This was the second in the series of