events which dated from the
rector's connection with Mrs. Armadale and her son. Mr. Brock's memory,
traveling on nearer and nearer to present circumstances, reached the
third stage of its journey through the by-gone time, and stopped at the
year eighteen hundred and fifty, next.

The five years that had passed had made little if any change in Allan's
character. He had simply developed (to use his tutor's own expression)
from a boy of sixteen to a boy of twenty-one. He was just as easy and
open in his disposition as ever; just as quaintly and inveterately
good-humored; just as heedless in following his own impulses, lead him
where they might. His bias toward the sea had strengthened with his
advance to the years of manhood. From building a boat, he had now got
on--with two journeymen at work under him--to building a decked vessel
of five-and-thirty tons. Mr. Brock had conscientiously tried to divert
him to higher aspirations; had taken him to Oxford, to see what college
life was like; had taken him to London, to expand his mind by the
spectacle of the great metropolis. The change had diverted Allan, but
had not altered him in the least. He was as impenetrably superior to
all worldly ambition as Diogenes himself. "Which is best," asked this
unconscious philosopher, "to find out the way to be happy for yourself,
or to let other people try if they can find it out for you?" From that
moment Mr. Brock permitted his pupil's character to grow at its own rate
of development, and Allan went on uninterruptedly with the work of his
yacht.

Time, which had wrought so little change in the son, had not passed
harmless over the mother.

Mrs. Armadale's health was breaking fast. As her strength failed, her
temper altered for the worse: she grew more and more fretful, more and
more subject to morbid fears and fancies, more and more reluctant to
leave her own room. Since the appearance of the advertisement five years
since, nothing had happened to force her memory back to the painful
associations connected with her early life. No word more on the
forbidden topic had passed between the rector and herself; no suspicion
had ever been raised in Allan's mind of the existence of his namesake;
and yet, without the shadow of a reason for any special anxiety, Mrs.
Armadale had become, of late years, obstinately and fretfully uneasy
on the subject of her son. More than once Mr. Brock dreaded a serious
disagreement between them; but Allan's natur