now I was?" he asked, after some little time, when they had
walked on in silence.

"Why, I don't know; some of the others said things about you; and,
besides, you know you are."

He would not say that he had noticed Arthur Vivyan's ways, and that he had
seen there, what showed him there was a difference between him and the
other boys; still less would he tell him just then, that there was an
aching wish in his heart that he could say the same for himself.

"Yes," Arthur said, "I am, Edgar; and do you know I wish you were."

"How do you know I am not?"

"Well, I don't _know_," said Arthur; "but I don't much think you are. Are
you?"

"No," said Edgar, pulling violently at the leaves that grew on the bushes
near.

"Shouldn't you like to be?"

"What is the use of liking?" asked Edgar North. "I shall be if it is God's
will, and I shan't if it is not."

"Oh," said Arthur, "that is a dreadful way to talk. I'm quite sure it is
not the right way."

"Well, I know I have thought a great deal about it, especially when I have
been ill, and it always makes me miserable, so I try not to think, and I
can't think what made me begin it now. Do let us talk about something
else."

And suddenly Edgar became very much interested in the subject of the next
local examination, in which several of his schoolfellows expected to take
part, and was much more lively for the rest of the walk than he had been
before.

But he did not seem to avoid Arthur; on the contrary, after that day, he
often seemed to try to be near him; and at length he surprised him very
much, by asking if he would come out for another walk. Arthur remembered
the last one that they had had, and he wondered why! it was not for any
pleasure to himself that he agreed, but at any rate this time it was not a
cricket-day.

"You did not want to come, did you?" asked Edgar, after some little time,
when they had been walking along through the fields, and had now reached a
distant one, where the hawthorn hedge was throwing a sheltering shade.
"And I expect you would just as soon sit down, as walk on further. Shall
we stop here?"

"What a queer fellow you are, Edgar," said Arthur; "I can't make you out
at all."

"How am I queer?" asked Edgar.

"Why, you _are_ queer; you are different from all the others. Perhaps it
is because you are not strong."

"No, I know I am not," Edgar said; "the doctor at my grandmother's used to
say I should not live."

Arthur looked very