ages in its neighborhood, and boats employed on it, and pleasure
parties visiting it? So again, he had waited to vindicate the firmer
resolution with which he looked to the future, until he had first
revealed all that he now saw himself of the errors of the past.
The abandonment of his friend's interests, the unworthiness of the
confidence that had given him the steward's place, the forgetfulness of
the trust that Mr. Brock had reposed in him all implied in the one idea
of leaving Allan--were all pointed out. The glaring self-contradictions
betrayed in accepting the Dream as the revelation of a fatality, and
in attempting to escape that fatality by an exertion of free-will--in
toiling to store up knowledge of the steward's duties for the
future, and in shrinking from letting the future find him in Allan's
house--were, in their turn, unsparingly exposed. To every error, to
every inconsistency, he resolutely confessed, before he ventured on the
last simple appeal which closed all, "Will you trust me in the future?
Will you forgive and forget the past?"

A man who could thus open his whole heart, without one lurking reserve
inspired by consideration for himself, was not a man to forget any minor
act of concealment of which his weakness might have led him to be guilty
toward his friend. It lay heavy on Midwinter's conscience that he had
kept secret from Allan a discovery which he ought in Allan's dearest
interests to have revealed--the discovery of his mother's room.

But one doubt still closed his lips--the doubt whether Mrs. Armadale's
conduct in Madeira had been kept secret on her return to England.

Careful inquiry, first among the servants, then among the tenantry,
careful consideration of the few reports current at the time, as
repeated to him by the few persons left who remembered them, convinced
him at last that the family secret had been successfully kept within the
family limits. Once satisfied that whatever inquiries the son might
make would lead to no disclosure which could shake his respect for his
mother's memory, Midwinter had hesitated no longer. He had taken Allan
into the room, and had shown him the books on the shelves, and all that
the writing in the books disclosed. He had said plainly, "My one motive
for not telling you this before sprang from my dread of interesting you
in the room which I looked at with horror as the second of the scenes
pointed at in the Dream. Forgive me this also, and you will ha