  In this paper, a linear second order numerical scheme is developed and
investigated for the Allen-Cahn equation with a general positive mobility. In
particular, our fully discrete scheme is mainly constructed based on the
Crank-Nicolson formula for temporal discretization and the central finite
difference method for spatial approximation, and two extra stabilizing terms
are also introduced for the purpose of improving numerical stability. The
proposed scheme is shown to unconditionally preserve the maximum bound
principle (MBP) under mild restrictions on the stabilization parameters, which
is of practical importance for achieving good accuracy and stability
simultaneously. With the help of uniform boundedness of the numerical solutions
due to MBP, we then successfully derive $H^{1}$-norm and $L^{\infty}$-norm
error estimates for the Allen-Cahn equation with a constant and a variable
mobility, respectively. Moreover, the energy stability of the proposed scheme
is also obtained in the sense that the discrete free energy is uniformly
bounded by the one at the initial time plus a {\color{black}constant}. Finally,
some numerical experiments are carried out to verify the theoretical results
and illustrate the performance of the proposed scheme with a time adaptive
strategy.
