Mr. Brock left his seat on the side of the bed, trimmed his candle, and, still lost in his own thoughts, looked out absently at the night. The change of place brought no new ideas with it. His retrospect over his own past life had amply satisfied him that his present sense of responsibility rested on no merely fanciful grounds, and, having brought him to that point, had left him there, standing at the window, and seeing nothing but the total darkness in his own mind faithfully reflected by the total darkness of the night.
"If I only had a friend to apply to!" thought the rector. "If I could only find some one to help me in this miserable place!"
At the moment when the aspiration crossed his mind, it was suddenly answered by a low knock at the door, and a voice said softly in the passage outside, "Let me come in."
After an instant's pause to steady his nerves, Mr. Brock opened the door, and found himself, at one o'clock in the morning, standing face to face on the threshold of his own bedroom with Ozias Midwinter.
"Are you ill?" asked the rector, as soon as his astonishment would allow him to speak.
"I have come here to make a clean breast of it!" was the strange answer. "Will you let me in?"
With those words he walked into the room, his eyes on the ground, his lips ashy pale, and his hand holding something hidden behind him.
"I saw the light under your door," he went on, without looking up, and without moving his hand, "and I know the trouble on your mind which is keeping you from your rest. You are going away to-morrow morning, and you don't like leaving Mr. Armadale alone with a stranger like me."
Startled as he was, Mr. Brock saw the serious necessity of being plain with a man who had come at that time, and had said those words to him.
"You have guessed right," he answered. "I stand in the place of a father to Allan Armadale, and I am naturally unwilling to leave him, at his age, with a man whom I don't know."
Ozias Midwinter took a step forward to the table. His wandering eyes rested on the rector's New Testament, which was one of the objects lying on it.
"You have read that Book, in the years of a long life, to many congregations," he said. "Has it taught you mercy to your miserable fellow-creatures?"