The next day after these events occurred the dinner at the Pimpernels. Miss Arden had made no further allusion to it in her brother’s presence. He had said he would stay away if she exacted it, but Clare was much too proud to exact. She stood aside, and let him have his will. She was even so amiable as to fasten a sprig of myrtle in his coat when he came to bid her good night. “That is very sweet of you, as you don’t approve of me,” he said, kissing the white hand that performed this little sisterly office. They were two orphans, alone in the world, and Edgar’s heart expanded over his sister, notwithstanding the many doubts and difficulties which he was aware he had occasioned her.

“Why should I disapprove?” she said. “You are a man; you are not so easily affected as a girl; but only please remember, Edgar, they are not people that it would be nice for you to see much of. They are not like us.”

“Not like you, certainly,” said light-hearted Edgar. “I rather liked to see you, do you know, beside them; you looked like a young queen.”

Clare was pleased, though she did not care to confess it. “It does not require much to make one look like a queen beside that good, fat Mrs. Pimpernel,” she said, with more charity than she had ever before felt towards her recent visitors. “If you are not very late, Edgar, perhaps I shall see you when you come home.”

And she watched him as he drove his dogcart down the avenue with a less anxious mind. “He is not like an Arden,” she said to herself; “but yet one could not but remark him wherever he went. He has so much heart and spirit about him; and I think he is clever. He knows a great deal more than most people, though that does not matter much. But still I think perhaps he would not be so easily carried away after all.”

Edgar, for his part, went away in very good spirits. He liked the rapid sense of motion, the light vehicle, the fine horse, the swiftness which was almost flight. He rather liked making a dive out of the formal world which had absorbed him, into another hemisphere; and he even liked, which would have vexed Clare had she known it, to be alone. He would not suffer himself to think so, for it seemed ungrateful, unbrotherly, unkind; but still a man cannot get over all the habits of his life in three weeks, and it was a pleasure to him to be alone. He seemed to have thrown off the burden of his responsibilities as he swept through the village and along the rural road to the Red House. He expected to be amused, and he was pleased that in his amusement he would be subject to no criticism. Criticism is very uncomfortable, especially when it comes from your nearest and dearest. To feel in your freest moments that an eye is upon you, that your proceedings are subject to lively comment, is always trying. And Edgar had not been used to it. Thanks to the sweetest temper in the world, he took it very well on the whole. But this night he certainly did feel the happier that he was free. The Pimpernels greeted him with a cordiality that was almost overpowering. The father shook both his hands, the mother pounced upon him and introduced him to a dozen people in a moment, and as for poor Alice, she blushed, and smiled, and buttoned her gloves, which was her usual occupation. When the business of the introduction was over Edgar fell back out of the principal place, and took a passing note of the guests. A dozen names had been said to him, but not one had he made out, except that of Lord Newmarch, who was a tall, spare young man in spectacles, with a thin intellectual face. There were two men of Mr Pimpernel’s stamp, with vast white waistcoats, and heads slightly bald—men very well known upon ’Change, and holding the best of reputations in Liverpool—with two wives, who were ample and benign, like the mistress of the house; and there were two or three men in a corner, with Oxford written all over them, curiously looking out through spectacles, or as it were out of mists, at the other part of the company. Lord Newmarch did not attach himself to either of these parties. It was not very long indeed since he had been an Oxford man himself, but he was now a politician, and had emerged from the academical state.

There was one other among the guests who attracted Edgar’s attention, he could not tell why—a tall man about ten years older than himself, with black hair, just touched in some places with grey, and deep-set dark-blue eyes, which shone like a bit of frosty sky out of his dark bearded face. The face was familiar to him, though he felt sure he had never seen this individual man before; and though he kept himself in the background there was an air about him which Edgar recognised by instinct. Among the old merchants and the young Dons—men limited on one hand within a very material universe, and on the other by the still straiter limitations of a purely intellectual sphere—this man looked, what he was, a man of the world. Edgar came to this conclusion instinctively, feeling himself drawn by an interest which was only half sympathy to the only individual in the party who deserved that name. Chance or Mrs. Pimpernel arranged it so that this man was placed at the opposite end of the table at dinner, quite out of Edgar’s reach. Mr. Arden of Arden had to conduct one of the most important ladies present to dinner, and was within reach of Mrs. Pimpernel with Alice on his other hand; but the stranger who interested him was at the foot of the table, being evidently a person of no importance. It was only Edgar’s second English party, and certainly at this moment it was not nearly so pleasant as the dinner at Thorne, with pretty Gussy telling him everything. Mrs. Buxton, who sat between him and Lord Newmarch, was too anxious to attend to her noble neighbour’s conversation to give very much attention to Edgar. Now and then she turned to him indeed, and was very affable; but her subject was still Newmarch, and they were too near to that personage to make the discussion agreeable. “You should hear Lord Newmarch on the education question,” the lady said; “his ideas are so clear, and then they are so charmingly expressed. I consider his style admirable. You don’t know it? How very strange, Mr. Arden! He contributes a good deal to the Edinburgh. I thought of course you must have been acquainted with his works.”

“I never read any of them,” said Edgar; and I trust I never shall, he felt he should have liked to have said; but he only added instead, “I have spent all my time wandering to and fro over the face of the earth, which leaves one in the depths of ignorance of everything one ought to know.”

“Oh, do you think so?” said Mrs. Buxton. “For my part, I think there is nothing like travelling for expanding the mind. Lord Newmarch published a charming book of travels last year—From Turnstall to Teneriffe. Turnstall is one of his family places, you know. It made quite a commotion in the literary world. I do think he is one of the most rising young men of the age.”

“Do you admire Lord Newmarch very much?” Edgar whispered to Alice, who was eating her fish very sedately by his side. Poor Alice grew very red, and gave a little choking cough, and put down her fork, and cleared her throat. She looked as if she had been caught doing something which was very improper, and dropped her fork as if it burned her. And it was a moment before she could speak. “Oh yes, Mr. Arden,” was the reply she made, giving a shy glance at him, and then looking down upon her plate.

“But don’t you think he looks a little too much as if the fate of the country rested on his head?” said Edgar, valiantly trying again. “Tell me, please, is he a bore?”

“Oh no, Mr. Arden!” said Alice, and she looked at her plate again. “Does she want to finish her fish, I wonder?” Edgar asked himself; and then he turned to Mrs. Buxton, to leave his younger companion at liberty. But Mrs. Buxton had tackled Lord Newmarch, and they were discussing the question of compulsory education, with much authoritative condescension on the gentleman’s part, and eager interest on the lady’s. Edgar was not uninterested in such questions, but he had come to the Red House with a light-hearted intention of amusing himself, and he sighed for Gussy Thornleigh and her gossip, or anything that should be pleasant and nonsensical. Alice had returned to her fish, not that she cared for the fish, but because it was the only thing for her to do. If Edgar had but known it, she was quite disposed to go on saying, “Oh yes, Mr. Arden,” and “Oh no, Mr. Arden,” all the time of dinner, without caring in the least for the entrees, or even for the jellies and creams and other dainties with which the banquet wound up. But then he did not know that, and could not but imagine that her fish was what she liked best.

In his despair, however, he caught Mrs. Pimpernel’s eye, who was looking bland but disturbed, saying “There is no doubt of that,” and “Education is very necessary,” and “I am sure I am quite of Lord Newmarch’s opinion,” at intervals. She was amiable, but she was not happy with that wise young nobleman at her right hand, and such an appreciative audience as Mrs. Buxton beside him. Edgar glanced across at her, and caught her look of distress. “I do not care anything about education,” he said, firing a friendly gun, as it were, across her bows. “I hate it when I am at dinner.” And then Mrs. Pimpernel gave him a look which said more than words.

“Oh, fie,” she said, leaning across the corner, “you know you should not say that. Do you think we English are behind in light conversation, Mr. Arden? For more important matters I know we can defy anybody,” and she gave Lord Newmarch an eloquent look, which he returned with a little bow; “but I daresay,” said Mrs. Pimpernel, with that cloud of uneasiness on her brow, “we are behind in chitter-chatter and table-talk.”

“I like chitter-chatter,” said Edgar; “and besides, I want to know who the people are. Who is that pretty girl on Mr. Pimpernel’s left hand? You must recollect I know nobody, and am quite a stranger in my own place.”

“Oh, Mr. Arden, that is Miss Molyneaux, Mrs. Molyneaux’s eldest daughter,” said the gracious hostess, indicating the lady on her left hand, who smiled and coloured, and looked at Edgar with friendly eyes. “She is pretty—such a complexion and teeth! Did you notice her teeth, Mr. Arden? They are like pearls. My Alice has nice teeth, but I always say they are nothing to compare to Mary Molyneaux’s. And that’s Mr. Arden, your namesake, beside her. He is considered a very handsome man.”

“Do you approve of personal gossip, Mr. Arden?” said Mrs. Buxton, breaking in; but Edgar was too much interested to be stopped, even by motives of civility.

“Mr. Arden, my namesake! Then that explains it.” He said these last words, not aloud, but within himself, for now he could see that the face which this man’s face recalled to him was that of his own sister, Clare. It gave him the most curious sensation, moving him almost to anger. A stranger whom he knew nothing of, who was nothing to him, to resemble Clare! It looked like profanity, desecration. After all, there was something evidently in the Arden blood—something entirely wanting to himself—a secret influence—which he, the first of the name, did not share.

“Not only your namesake,” said Lord Newmarch, in his thin voice, much to Mrs. Buxton’s disgust. The young lord was very philosophical, and full to overflowing with questions of political importance, and the progress of the world, and all the knowledge of the nineteenth century; but still he was patrician born, and could not resist a genealogical question. “Not only your namesake. He is old Arthur Arden’s son, who was your father’s first cousin. He is the nearest relative you have except your sister; and, as long as you don’t have sons of your own, he is the next heir.”

“Ah!” said Edgar, as if he had sustained a blow. He could not explain how it was that he received the information thus. Why should he object to Arthur Arden, or be anything but pleased to see the next in the succession—the man who, of all the men in the world, should be most interesting to him? “The same blood runs in our veins,” he tried to say to himself, and gazed down curiously at the end of the table, raising thereby a little pleasurable excitement in the bosom of Mrs. Molyneaux, who sat opposite to him. “He is struck with my Mary,” the mother thought; and Edgar was so good a match that it was no wonder she was moved a little. Fortunately, Mary knew nothing about it, but sat by the other Arden, and chattered as much as Gussy Thornleigh had done, and could not help thinking what a pity it was so handsome a man, and one so like the family, should not be the true heir. “I have been over Arden Hall, and you are so like the portraits,” Mary Molyneaux was saying at that very moment, while Lord Newmarch explained who her companion was to Edgar. “The present Mr. Arden is not a bit like them. I can’t help feeling as if you must be the rightful Squire.”

“I have got only the complexion, and not the lands,” said Mr. Arthur Arden. “It is a poor exchange. And this is the first time I ever saw my cousin. He does not know me from Adam. We are not a very friendly race; but I know Clare.”

“Oh, Miss Arden? Don’t you think she is quite beautiful—but awfully proud?” said the girl. “She will not know the Pimpernels; though all the best people have called on them, she will never call. Don’t you think it is horrid for a girl to be so proud?”

“She has the family spirit,” said her kinsman, with a look which Mary, in her innocence, did not comprehend. The talk at the table at Thorne was more amusing, but perhaps there was a deeper interest in what was then going on at the Red House.