Clare’s entrance with a little case in her hand roused him. She came up, and put her arm within his where he stood, and, thus hanging on him, opened the case, and showed him the miniature, which formed the clasp of a bracelet. It was the portrait of a face so young that it startled him. He had been thinking and talking of his mother, which meant something almost venerable, and this was the face of a girl younger, ever so much younger, than himself. “Are you sure this is her?” he said in a whisper, taking it out of his sister’s hand. “Of course it is her; who else could it be?” she answered, in the same tone. “She is so young,” said Edgar, apologetically. He was quite startled by that youthfulness. He held it up to the light, and looked at it with wondering admiration. “This child! Could she be my mother, your mother, Clare?”
“I suppose everybody is young some time. She must have looked very different from that when she died.”
“Will it ever seem as strange, I wonder,” said Edgar, still little above a whisper, “to somebody to look at your portrait and mine? How pretty she must have been, Clare. What a sweet look in her eyes! You have that look sometimes, though you are not like her. Poor little thing! What a soft innocent-looking child.”
“Edgar,” said his sister, half horrified, for she had little imagination, “do you remember you are speaking of mamma?”
He gave a strange little laugh, which seemed made up of pleasure and tears. “Do you think I might kiss her?” he said under his breath. Clare was half scandalized half angry. He was always so strange; you never could tell what he might do or say next; he was so inconsistent, not bound by sacred laws like the Ardens; but still his sister herself was a little touched by the portrait and the suggestions it made.
“She would not have been old now if she had been living, not too old for a companion. Oh, Edgar, what a difference it would have made! I never had a real companion, not one I was thoroughly fond of; only think what it would have been to have had her——”
“With that face!” Edgar said, with a sigh of relief, though Clare could not guess why he felt so relieved. Then—“I wonder if she would have liked me,” he said, softly. “Clare, there has been a kind fiction about my mother. I am not like her. I don’t think I am like her. But she looks as innocent as an angel, Clare.”
“Why should not she be innocent?” said Clare, wondering. “We are all innocent. I don’t see why you should fix upon that. What strikes me is that she must have been so pretty. Don’t you think it is pretty? How arched the eyebrows are and dark, though she is so fair.”
“But I am not like her,” he said, shaking his head. How strange it was. Was he a waif of fortune, some mere stray soul whom Providence had made to be born in the house of Arden, quite out of its natural sphere? It gave him a little shock, and yet somehow he could feel no sharp disappointment on the day he had made acquaintance with this innocent face.
“Do you think not?” said Clare, faltering. “Oh, yes; you are like her. See how fair she is, and you are fair, and the Ardens are all dark; besides, you know, poor papa—— Don’t change like that, Edgar, when I mention his name. He was the only one who knew her, and he said——”