Except in Clare Arden’s face and voice. She came down stairs before her brother, long before him, as if she had been unable to sleep. Her brow was drawn in and contracted as if by some pressing uncertainty and suspense. Her voice had a broken tone in it, a tone like a strained string. With a restlessness which it was impossible to conceal, she waited for Edgar’s appearance, gliding back and forward from the library to the dining-room where breakfast was laid. The round table had been placed for them in the window not by Clare’s care, but by Wilkins; a great vase of late roses—red and white—stood in the centre. The roses were all but over, for it was the second Sunday in July; but still the lawns and rosebeds of Arden produced enough for this. How strange she thought that he should be so late. Was it out of mere wantonness? Was it because he had been sitting up late over the enclosures she had given him; was it that he feared to meet her after—— She suggested all these reasons to herself, but they did not still her restlessness nor bring Edgar down a moment earlier. She could not control her excitement. How was she to meet him for the first time after this discovery, if it was a discovery? How would he look at her after such a revelation? And yet Clare did not know what manner of revelation it was; or it might be no revelation at all. It might be her fancy only which had put meaning into the words she had seen. They might refer to something entirely indifferent to her brother and herself. Clare said so in her own mind, but she could not bring herself to believe it. The thought had seized upon her with crushing bewildering force. It had left her no time to think. She did not quite know what she fancied, but it was something that would shake her life and his life to their foundations, and change everything in heaven and earth.
Edgar came down at his usual hour, bright and light-hearted, as his nature was. He went up to the breakfast table with its vase of roses, and bent his face down over it. “How pleasant Sunday is,” he said, “and how pleasant it is to be at home! I hope you are better this morning, Clare. Could any one help being better in this sweet air and this lovely place? I never thought Arden was half so beautiful. Fancy, there are people in town just now wasting their lives away! I am sure you are better, Clare——”
“I—think so,” she said, looking at him anxiously. Had he read them? Had he not read them? That was the question. Her whole soul was bent upon that and that alone.
“You are not looking well,” he said, with tender anxiety. “What have you been doing to yourself? I would say I hoped you had missed me; but you don’t look so very glad to see me now—not nearly so glad as I am to see you. If you had come with me to town it might have done you good. And I am sure it would have done me good. It is dreary work living alone—in London above all——”
“Not for a man,” said Clare. Her voice was still constrained; but she made a desperate effort, and put away from her as much as she could her disinclination for talk. How unlike he was to other men—how strange that he should not take pleasure in things that everybody else took pleasure in; dreary work living alone, for a young man of his position, in London—how ridiculous it was!
“Well, I assure you I found it so,” said Edgar; “if you had been with me, I should have enjoyed it. As it was, I was only amused. The Thornleighs are coming back to-morrow. I saw a great deal of them—more than before they went to town——”
Here he paused, and a warmer colour, a certain air of pleasure and content diffused itself over his face. A thrill of pain and apprehension ran through Clare. The Thornleighs!—were they to be brought into the matter too? She half rose from the seat she had taken at the table. “Have you read those letters?” she asked, in a hasty, half-whispering, yet almost stern voice.
“What letters? Oh, those you gave me last night! No, not yet. Do you wish me to do it at once? You said it did not matter, I think; or, at least, I understood there was no haste.”
“Oh, no haste!” said Clare, with a certain sense of desperation stealing over her; and then she took courage. “I don’t mean that; they have troubled me very much. The sooner you read them, the sooner I shall be relieved, if I am to be relieved. If it would not trouble you too much to go over them to-night?”
“My dear Clare, of course I will read them directly if you wish it,” said Edgar, half-provoked. “You have but to say so. Of course, nothing troubles me that you wish. I sent down to ask after poor little Jeanie this morning,” he added, after a pause, falling into his usual tone; “and the doctor says she has had a tolerably good night. I must go and see Miss Somers after church. She will have learned all about it by this time, and that story about Arthur Arden and the Pimpernels. Miss Pimpernel, I told you, was thrown out of the carriage as well as Jeanie——”