In the meantime Edgar rode back to Arden, saying these words over to himself--one life ended and another begun. The one so sweet and warm and kindly and familiar, the other so cold and so unknown. He did not even know what his name was--who he was. The letters in the packet were few in number. They were signed only with initials. The post-marks on one outside cover which was preserved had been partially obliterated; but the name, so far as he could make it out, was that of some insignificant post-town which he had never heard of. At present, however, that question had not moved him much. He knew himself only as Edgar Arden. He could not realise himself in any other character, although at this very moment he had been proclaiming himself to be Edgar Arden no more. How hard it would be to change; to tear up his roots, as it were, to be no more Clare’s brother, to enter a world absolutely unknown. Ah, yes! but that was a distant dread--a thing that looked less by being far. In the meantime it was not the passive suffering, but the active, that was to be his. As he rode along, he asked himself anxiously what must be his next step. The Rector must be told, and Dr. Somers. He thought with a little gleam of satisfaction of going to the Doctor, and dispersing all his evil thoughts in the twinkling of an eye. That sweet little gentle face in the picture, the woman who was Clare’s mother, not his--it was his part to remove the cloud that had so long been over it. He saw now that everybody had more or less believed in this cloud--that there had been a feeling abroad even among those who defended her most warmly that poor Mrs. Arden required defence. And now it was he, not her son, a changeling, who was to do her justice. “I can clear my mother,” he said to himself--and another swift shooting pang went through his heart the moment he was conscious of the words he had used--but he could not disentangle this dreary knot. The confusion would clear away with time. He could not stop using the words he had always used, or turn his thoughts in a moment from the channel they had flowed in all his life.