“I don’t forget anything,” said Arthur. “There was one between us that took it upon him to keep me away, that prevented me from seeing you, prejudiced you against me, and has all but beguiled you away from me. But, Clare, you see through it now. Are words necessary between you and me? When I was a beggar I might hesitate to ask you to share my poverty, but now---- Don’t you know that I would rather have you without Arden than Arden without you----” Let him take everything else, as long as he leaves me you--these had been the words Arthur Arden had spoken two days ago. They rang in Clare’s ears as clearly as if he had just pronounced them, and they had an echo in his own memory. But neither of them referred to that vain offer now--neither of them said a syllable of Edgar. “If he had not so shocked me, so repelled me, brought in that woman,” Clare said to herself in faint self-apology--but not a word did she say aloud. She laid down her head on Arthur Arden’s shoulder, and wept away the accumulated excitement and irritation and misery of the past night. She did not reproach him for his delay or ask a single question. She had wanted him, oh, so sorely! and he had come at last. “It is too great happiness,” said Arthur, when they had sat there all the bright morning through and made their plans, “that you and I should spend all our lives together in Arden, Clare. To have you anywhere would have seemed too much joy a month ago; but you and Arden! which I have been kept out of, banished from, treated as a stranger in----” “Do not think of that now, do not think of that now! Oh, Arthur, if you love me, be kind to him.” “Kind to him! when he had all but succeeded in severing you from me, in carrying you away, with Heaven knows what intention. But, my Clare,” said the new Squire Arden, with that paper in his pocket, of which he did not say a word to her, “for your sake!” And Clare believed him, every word--she who was not credulous, nor full of faith, and who prided herself that she knew the world--her own world, in which people were moved by comprehensible motives, not visionary impulses. Clare believed her lover. He would be kind, he would not be too hard or unmerciful. He would forgive the usurper, the Edgar who was Mrs. Murray’s son. She stifled every other feeling in that moment of love and intoxication--if, indeed, at such a time there was room for any other feeling towards the Edgar who had been the brother of her youth.