He felt that the outburst at the end was injudicious, but could not restrain the ebullition of feeling. If he could but be allowed to manage it quietly, to have her misery broken to Clare without any interposition of the world’s scorn or pity. She was the one utterly guiltless, but it was she who would be most exposed to animadversion; he felt this, with his heart bleeding for his sister. If he had but had the privilege of a brother--if he could have gone to her, and drawn her gently away, and provided home and sympathy for her, before the blow had fallen! But neither he nor anyone could do this, for Clare was not the kind of being to make close friends. She reserved her love for the few who belonged to her, and had little or none to expend on strangers. Did she still think of him as one belonging to her, or was his recollection altogether eclipsed, blotted out from her mind? He began half a dozen letters to Clare herself, asking if she still thought of him, if she would allow him to remember that he was once her brother, with a humility which he could not have shown had she been as happy and prosperous as all the world believed her to be. But after he had written these letters, one after another, retouching a phrase here, and an epithet there, which was too weak or too strong for his excited fancy, and lingering over her name with tears in his eyes, he destroyed them all. Until he heard from her husband, he did not feel that he could venture to write to his sister. His sister!--his poor, forlorn, ruined, solitary sister, rich as she was, and surrounded by all things advantageous! a wife, and yet no wife; the mother of children whose birth would be their shame! Edgar rose up from where he was writing in the intolerable pang of this thought--he could not keep still while it flashed through his mind. Clara, the proudest, the purest, the most fastidious of women--how could she bear it? He said to himself that it was impossible--impossible--that she must die of it! There was no way of escape for her. It would kill her, and his was the hand which had to give the blow. In this condition, with such thoughts running over in his vexed brain, to go back to the shop, and find poor Mr. Tottenham wrestling among the difficulties which, poor man, were overwhelming him, with dark lines of care under his eyes, and his face haggard with anxiety--imagine, dear reader, what it was! He could have laughed at the petty trouble; yet no one could laugh at the pained face, the kind heart wounded, the manifest and quite overwhelming trouble of the philanthropist.