The two sisters were so pleasant and kind to her, that Fanny might have enjoyed her visit could she have believed herself not in the way, and had it not been for the fact that Miss Crawford was liable to feel a certain sanguine hunger any moment.

It was beginning to look brighter, when Fanny, observing a harp in the room, asked some questions about it, in order to put off any possible vampiric intentions, and disclosed her wish to hear it.

“Shall I play to you now?” said Miss Crawford. “What will you have?”

Anything but a reel, thought Fanny, but voiced a more polite response.

Miss Crawford played accordingly; happy to have a new listener who seemed so much obliged, so full of wonder at the performance, and who shewed herself not wanting in taste. She played till Fanny’s eyes, straying to the window on the weather’s being evidently fair, spoke what she felt must be done.

“Another quarter of an hour,” said Miss Crawford, “and we shall see how it will be. Do not run away the first moment of its holding up. Those clouds look alarming. And—” she added with a sarcastic smile in a high whisper, “I promise not to bite.”

“I have no doubt. But the clouds are passed over,” said Fanny.

“I know a black cloud when I see it; and you must not set forward while it is so threatening.”

“I believe the threat lies within as well as without.”

Miss Crawford laughed. “Ah, well said. However, I want to play something more to you—a very pretty piece—and your cousin Edmund’s prime favourite. You must stay and hear your cousin’s favourite.”

Fanny felt that she must; and though she had not waited for that sentence to be thinking of Edmund, such a memento made her particularly awake to his idea, and she fancied him sitting in that room again and again, perhaps in the very spot where she sat now, listening with constant delight to the favourite air, played with superior tone and expression. . . . Thus impatient to be gone she was kindly asked to call again.

Such was the origin of the sort of intimacy which took place between them within the first fortnight after the Miss Bertrams’ going away—an intimacy resulting principally from Miss Crawford’s desire of something new, and which had little reality in Fanny’s feelings. Fanny went to her every two or three days: it seemed a kind of dark fascination, a sort of fragile truce. She went, and they sauntered about together many an half-hour in Mrs. Grant’s shrubbery, the weather being unusually mild for the time of year, and venturing sometimes even to sit down on one of the benches.