stifying his conduct in the estimation of others; and, if he evaded
that responsibility, he abdicated the position of a gentleman. It is
quite possible that this antiquated way of thinking exists no longer;
but it is too late for me, at my time of life, to adopt more modern
views. I am scrupulously anxious, seeing that we live in a country and
a time in which the only court of honor is a police-court, to express
myself with the utmost moderation of language upon this the last
occasion that I shall have to communicate with you. Allow me, therefore,
merely to remark that our ideas of the conduct which is becoming in a
gentleman differ seriously; and permit me on this account to request
that you will consider yourself for the future as a stranger to my
family and to myself.

"Your obedient servant,

"DAVID MILROY."

The Monday morning on which his client received the major's letter was
the blackest Monday that had yet been marked in Pedgift's calendar. When
Allan's first angry sense of the tone of contempt in which his friend
and neighbor pronounced sentence on him had subsided, it left him sunk
in a state of depression from which no efforts made by his traveling
companion could rouse him for the rest of the day. Reverting naturally,
now that his sentence of banishment had been pronounced, to his early
intercourse with the cottage, his memory went back to Neelie, more
regretfully and more penitently than it had gone back to her yet. "If
_she_ had shut the door on me, instead of her father," was the bitter
reflection with which Allan now reviewed the past, "I shouldn't have had
a word to say against it; I should have felt it served me right."

The next day brought another letter--a welcome letter this time,
from Mr. Brock. Allan had written to Somersetshire on the subject of
refitting the yacht some days since. The letter had found the rector
engaged, as he innocently supposed, in protecting his old pupil against
the woman whom he had watched in London, and whom he now believed to
have followed him back to his own home. Acting under the directions sent
to her, Mrs. Oldershaw's house-maid had completed the mystification of
Mr. Brock. She had tranquilized all further anxiety on the rector's part
by giving him a written undertaking (in the character of Miss Gwilt),
engaging never to approach Mr. Armadale, either personally or by letter!
Firmly persuaded that he had won the victory at last, poor Mr. Brock
answered Allan's