“Do you, Clare; do you, indeed, Clare?” he said, and went to her side, and kissed her with brotherly tenderness. “God do so to me and more also,” he said to himself, if I ever forget her good and her happiness; or, at least, if he did not say the words, such was the sentiment that passed through his mind. He was so much moved that he felt able to ask a question he had been hesitating over all the morning. “Clare,” he said softly, bending over her, and smoothing her dark hair. His voice had a certain sound of supplication in it which struck her strangely. She thought he was about to ask something hard to do--perhaps a renunciation, perhaps a sacrifice. “Clare, can you tell me anything about our mother? Do you know?” “About mamma?” said Clare, with a sense of disappointment. “Edgar, you frighten me so; I thought you were going to ask me something that was very hard. About mamma? Of course I will tell you all I know.” “And there is a portrait--you said there was a portrait--I should like to see that too.” “Yes, Edgar, I will run and get it. Oh, I wonder if you would have been very like her--if she had lived? I sometimes think it would have been so much better for us all.” “Do you think so?” said Edgar, with a sadness which he could not control. Would it have been better? But, at all events, Clare knew of nothing evil that concerned their mother. He walked about the room slowly while she went to seek the portrait, and finally paused at the great window, and gazed out. It had the same view over the park which he had looked at last night under the moon-light. Now, in the morning, with a certain ache of strange doubtfulness, he looked at it again. The feeling in his mind was that it might all dissolve as he looked, and melt away, and leave no sign--that, and the house, and the room he stood in, with all their appearance of weight and reality. Such things had been; at least, surely that was what Dr. Somers’ story meant about those Agostini. What was it? “Something about the mother.” A mist of bewilderment had fallen over him, and he could not tell. Clare’s entrance with a little case in her hand roused him. She came up, and put her arm within his where he stood, and, thus hanging on him, opened the case, and showed him the miniature, which formed the clasp of a bracelet. It was the portrait of a face so young that it startled him. He had been thinking and talking of his mother, which meant something almost venerable, and this was the face of a girl younger, ever so much younger, than himself. “Are you sure this is her?” he said in a whisper, taking it out of his sister’s hand. “Of course it is her; who else could it be?” she answered, in the same tone. “She is so young,” said Edgar, apologetically. He was quite startled by that youthfulness. He held it up to the light, and looked at it with wondering admiration. “This child! Could she be my mother, your mother, Clare?”