The whole of noisy, crowded London was as a wilderness to Edgar. He drove to his club, where he had not been since the day when he met Mr. Tottenham. So short a time ago, and yet how his life had altered in the interval! He was no longer drifting vaguely upon the current, as he had been doing. His old existence had caught at him with anxious hands. Notwithstanding all the alterations of time, circumstances, and being, he was at this moment not Edgar Earnshaw at all, but the Edgar Arden of three years ago, caught back into the old sphere, surrounded by the old thoughts. Such curious vindications of the unchangeableness of character, the identity of being, which suddenly seize upon a man, and whirl him back in a moment, defying all external changes, into his old, his unalterable self, are among the strangest things in humanity. Dizzy with the shock he had received, harassed by anxiety, worn out by unsuccessful effort, Edgar felt the world swim round with him, and scarcely could answer to himself who he was. Had all the Lockwood business been a dream? Was it a dream that he had been as a stranger for three long years to Clare, his sister--to Gussy, his almost bride? And yet his mind at this moment was as full of their images as if no interval had been. After he had dined and refreshed himself, he set to work with, I think,--notwithstanding his anxiety, the first shock of which was now over,--a thrill of conscious energy, and almost pleasure in something to do, which was so much more important than those vague lessons to Phil, or vaguer studies in experimental philosophy, to which his mind had been lately turned. To be here on the spot, ready to work for Clare when she was assailed, was something to be glad of, deeply as the idea of such an assault upon her had excited and pained him. And at the same time as his weariness wore off, and the first excitement cooled down, he began to feel himself more able to realize the matter in all its particulars, and see the safer possibilities. It began to appear to him likely enough that all that could be proved was Arthur Arden’s villainy, a subject which did not much concern him, which had no novelty in it, and which, though Clare was Arthur Arden’s wife, could not affect her more now than it had done ever since she married him. Indeed, if it was but this, there need be no necessity for communicating it to Clare at all. It was more probable, when he came to think of it, that an educated and clever man should be able to outwit a dressmaker girl, however deeply instructed in the laws of marriage by novels and _causes célèbres_, than that she should outwit him; and in this case there was nothing that need ever be made known to Clare.