“I will go and secure her confidence,” said Edgar, with that gay readiness for everything which Lady Mary, with such amaze, had remarked already in his tone. Up to this moment he had wanted confidence in himself, and carried into everything the _insouciance_ of a man who takes up with friendliness the interests of others, but has none of his own. All this was changed. He was another man, liberated somehow from chains which she had never realised until now, when she saw they were broken. Could her conversation with him to-day have anything to do with it? Lady Mary was a very clever woman, but she groped in vain in the dark for some insight into the mind of this young man, who had seemed to her so simple. And the less she understood him, the more she respected Edgar; nay, her respect for him began to increase, from the moment when she found out that he was not so absolutely virtuous as she had taken him to be. Next day, as soon as Phil’s lessons were over, Edgar shut himself up, and, with a flush upon his face, and a certain tremor, which seemed to him to make his hand and his writing, by some curious paradox, more firm than usual, began to write letters. He wrote to Lord Newmarch, he wrote to one or two others whom he had known in his moment of prosperity, with a boldness and freedom at which he was himself astonished. He recalled to his old acquaintances, without feeling the least hesitation in doing so, the story of his past life, about which he had been, up to this moment, so proudly silent, and appealed to them to find him something to do. He wrote, not as a humble suitor does, but as one conscious of no humiliation in asking. The last time he had asked he had been conscious of humiliation; but every shadow of that self-consciousness had blown away from him now. He wondered at himself even, while he looked at those letters closed and directed on his writing-table. What was it that had taken away from him all sense of dislike to this proceeding, all his old inclination to let things go as they would? With that curious tremor which was so full of firmness and force still vibrating through him, he went out, avoiding Phil, who was lying in wait for him, and who moaned his absence like a sheep deprived of its lamb--which, I think, was something like the parental feeling Phil experienced for his tutor--and set out for a long solitary walk across country, leaping ditches and stumbling across ploughed fields, by way of exhausting a little his own superabundant force and energy. Only a day or two since how dreary was the feeling with which he had left the house, where perhaps, for aught he knew, Gussy was at the moment thinking, with a sickening at his heart which seemed to make all nature dim, how he must never see her again, how he had pledged himself to keep out of the way, never to put himself consciously where he might have even the dreary satisfaction of a look at her. The same pledge was upon him still, and Edgar was ready to keep