Edgar Arden had lived hitherto, as we have said, a very desultory wandering sort of life. He had been at school in Germany during his earlier years, and afterwards at Heidelberg, at the University, where he had seen a great many English afar off, and vaguely found out the difference between their training and ways of thinking and those in which he had himself been brought up. When he had first come to the age when a boy begins to inquire into his own position, and when it no longer becomes possible to take everything for granted, he had been told first that it was for his health that he had been sent away from home; and when he had fully satisfied himself that his health could no longer be the reason, other causes had been suggested to him equally unsatisfactory. It was his father who was in bad health, and could not be troubled with a lively boy about him; but then there were schools in England as well as in Germany, which would have settled that matter: or the German education was superior, which was a theory his tutor strongly inclined to, but which did not seem to Edgar’s lively young intelligence quite justified by the opinion visibly entertained by the English travellers whom he met. His first visit to England, after he was old enough to understand, made matters a great deal more clear to him. Injustice and dislike are hard to conceal from a young mind, even under the most specious disguises--and here no disguise was attempted. The Squire received his boy with a coldness which chilled him to the heart, saw as little of him as he possibly could, endured his presence with undisguised reluctance, and made it quite apparent to poor Edgar that, unlike all the other sons he had ever seen in his life, he was only a vexation and trouble to his father. The fact that his father was his enemy dawned vaguely upon him at a much later period; for it is hard in extreme youth to think that one has an enemy. A vague sense of being hustled into corners, and shut out of the life of the family, such as it was, had been the cloud upon his earlier days. He had felt that only in Clare’s nursery did he hold that position of chief and favourite to which surely the only son of the house was entitled. And little Clare accordingly became the one bright spot in the house which he still by instinct called home.