Edgar Arden shook his head. The face in the miniature was not sanguine and ruddy, like his, but a pensive face; locks too fair to be called golden surrounding it, and soft blue eyes. Everything was soft, gentle, tender, composed, in the young face. Even Clare’s grave beauty, though in itself so different, was less unlike her than Edgar’s warm vitality, the gleams of superabundant life, which showed as colour in his hair and as light in his eyes. “I am not like her,” he said to himself, as he closed the little case and gave it back to his sister; but the shadow which had been upon him all the morning had disappeared for ever. Whatever was the secret of his story, it was not like the story of the Agostini. Once and for ever he dismissed that dread from his breast. CHAPTER XIX. It was, however, some time before Edgar got over the painful impression made upon his mind by what Dr. Somers had said. He had known very well for the greater part of his life that his father did not love him; but the idea that doubt had ever fallen upon his rights, that there had been a possibility of shutting him out from his natural inheritance, had never entered his mind. Of course there was really no such possibility; but still the merest suggestion of it excited the young man. It seemed to hint at a deeper secret in his own existence than anything he had yet suspected. He had been able to take it for granted with all the carelessness of youth that his father disliked him. But why should his father dislike him? What reason could there be? And then that story of the Agostini returned to him. Edgar pondered and pondered it for days, and rejected the suggestions conveyed in it, feeling from the moment he had seen his mother’s picture a certain fierce sentiment of rage against Dr. Somers as her maligner. But yet this explanation being evidently a false one, and his mother cleared of all shadow of shame or wrong, there remained the strange thought that there must be some clue to the mystery; and what was it? If it had been within the bounds of possibility that the Squire could have doubted his wife’s faithfulness, that of course would have explained a great deal. But the evidence of the portrait was quite conclusive that any such suspicion was out of the question. Edgar was young and fanciful, and ready to accept the evidence of a look, and every natural sentiment within him rose up in defence of his mother. But he could not help asking himself, even though the question seemed an injury to her--what if it had been possible? Had she been another kind of woman and, capable of wickedness, what in such horrible circumstances would it have been a man’s duty to do? He had of course heard such questions discussed, like everybody else in the world, as affecting the husband and wife, the immediate parties. But imagine a young man making such a discovery, finding himself out to be a spurious branch thus arbitrarily engrafted upon a family tree; in a position so