“Disagreeable!” Edgar murmured half consciously. “Why should it be disagreeable?” but even his own voice seemed to be changed in his own ear as he said it. He was all changed, and everything about him. “I must go across to the pond before I go in,” he added, somewhat abruptly. “I promised Philip to look at the ice;” and with scarcely any further excuse, set off across the grass, from which the whiteness and crispness of the morning frosts had been stolen away by the sun. He could not get free of the physical sensation of having fallen. He seemed to himself to be bruised and shaken; he could do nothing with his mind but realize and identify his state; he could not discuss it with himself. It did not seem to him even that he knew what he had been thinking of, what he had been hoping; he knew only that he had fallen from some strange height, and lay at the bottom somewhere, aching and broken in heart and strength, stunned by the fall, and so confused that he did not know what had happened to him, or what he must do next. In this state of mind he walked mechanically across the grass, and gazed at the frozen pond, without knowing what he was doing, and then strode mechanically away from it, and went home. (How soon we begin to call any kind of a place home, when we have occasion to use it as such!). He went home, back to his room, the room which surely, he thought to himself, was too good for Mr. Tottenham’s tutor, which was the post he had been asked to occupy. Mr. Tottenham’s boy’s tutor, that was the phrase. It was his own repetition of these words which roused him a little; the tutor in the house; the handy man who was made to do everything; the one individual among the gentlemen of the house whom it was possible to order about; who was an equal, and yet no equal. No, Edgar said to himself, with a generous swelling of his heart, it was not thus that a dependent would be treated in Mr. Tottenham’s house; but the very idea of being a dependent struck him with such sharp poignancy of surprise, as well as pain, that he could not calm himself down, or make the best of it. He had never tasted what this was like yet. When he had made his application to Lord Newmarch, the experience had not been a pleasant one; but it was short at least, and the position he had hoped for had been independent at least. In it, he would have been no man’s servant, but the Queen’s, whom all men delight to serve. Mr. Tottenham’s tutor was a very different thing.