m. The firm looked in interrogative wonder at
Mr. Brock. A client who could see a position among the landed gentry of
England waiting for him, without being in a hurry to occupy it at the
earliest possible opportunity, was a client of whom they possessed no
previous experience.

"He must have been very oddly brought up," said the lawyers to the
rector.

"Very oddly," said the rector to the lawyers.

A last leap over one month more brought Mr. Brock to the present
time--to the bedroom at Castletown, in which he was sitting thinking,
and to the anxiety which was obstinately intruding itself between
him and his night's rest. That anxiety was no unfamiliar enemy to the
rector's peace of mind. It had first found him out in Somersetshire six
months since, and it had now followed him to the Isle of Man under the
inveterately obtrusive form of Ozias Midwinter.

The change in Allan's future prospects had worked no corresponding
alteration in his perverse fancy for the castaway at the village inn.
In the midst of the consultations with the lawyers he had found time
to visit Midwinter, and on the journey back with the rector there was
Allan's friend in the carriage, returning with them to Somersetshire by
Allan's own invitation.

The ex-usher's hair had grown again on his shaven skull, and his dress
showed the renovating influence of an accession of pecuniary means, but
in all other respects the man was unchanged. He met Mr. Brock's distrust
with the old uncomplaining resignation to it; he maintained the same
suspicious silence on the subject of his relatives and his early life;
he spoke of Allan's kindness to him with the same undisciplined fervor
of gratitude and surprise. "I have done what I could, sir," he said to
Mr. Brock, while Allan was asleep in the railway carriage. "I have kept
out of Mr. Armadale's way, and I have not even answered his last letter
to me. More than that is more than I can do. I don't ask you to consider
my own feeling toward the only human creature who has never suspected
and never ill-treated me. I can resist my own feeling, but I can't
resist the young gentleman himself. There's not another like him in the
world. If we are to be parted again, it must be his doing or yours--not
mine. The dog's master has whistled," said this strange man, with a
momentary outburst of the hidden passion in him, and a sudden springing
of angry tears in his wild brown eyes, "and it is hard, sir, to blame
the dog when