ned
herself with the lives of the two Armadales in the first generation, and
with the fortunes of the two Armadales in the second--who was at once
the marked object of his father's death-bed warning, and the first cause
of the family calamities which had opened Allan's way to the Thorpe
Ambrose estate--the woman, in a word, whom he would have known
instinctively, but for Mr. Brock's letter, to be the woman whom he had
now actually seen.

Looking at events as they had just happened, under the influence of the
misapprehension into which the rector had innocently misled him, his
mind saw and seized its new conclusion instantaneously, acting precisely
as it had acted in the past time of his interview with Mr. Brock at the
Isle of Man.

Exactly as he had once declared it to be an all-sufficient refutation of
the idea of the Fatality, that he had never met with the timber-ship
in any of his voyages at sea, so he now seized on the similarly derived
conclusion, that the whole claim of the Dream to a supernatural origin
stood self-refuted by the disclosure of a stranger in the Shadow's
place. Once started from this point--once encouraged to let his love for
Allan influence him undividedly again, his mind hurried along the whole
resulting chain of thought at lightning speed. If the Dream was proved
to be no longer a warning from the other world, it followed inevitably
that accident and not fate had led the way to the night on the Wreck,
and that all the events which had happened since Allan and he had
parted from Mr. Brock were events in themselves harmless, which his
superstition had distorted from their proper shape. In less than a
moment his mobile imagination had taken him back to the morning at
Castletown when he had revealed to the rector the secret of his name;
when he had declared to the rector, with his father's letter before his
eyes, the better faith that was in him. Now once more he felt his heart
holding firmly by the bond of brotherhood between Allan and himself; now
once more he could say with the eager sincerity of the old time, "If the
thought of leaving him breaks my heart, the thought of leaving him
is wrong!" As that nobler conviction possessed itself again of his
mind--quieting the tumult, clearing the confusion within him--the house
at Thorpe Ambrose, with Allan on the steps, waiting, looking for him,
opened on his eyes through the trees. A sense of illimitable relief
lifted his eager spirit high above the