“You must give us more than half your time,” said he. “I cannot admit Mrs. Grant to have an equal claim with Fanny and myself, for we shall both have a right in you. Fanny will be so truly your sister!”

Mary made grateful assurances. But she had no intention of being the guest of either brother or sister many months longer.

“You will divide your year between London and Northamptonshire?”

“Yes,” he said.

“That’s right; and in London, of course, a house of your own: no longer with the Admiral. My dearest Henry, the advantage to you of getting away from the Admiral before your manners are hurt by the contagion of his, before you have contracted any of his foolish opinions, or learned to sit over your dinner as if it were the best blessing of life! You are not sensible of the gain, for your regard for him has blinded you. But your marrying early may save you. To have you grow like the Admiral, would have broken my unbeating heart.”

“Well, well, we do not think quite alike here. The Admiral has his faults, but he is a very good man, and has been more than a father to me. Few fathers would have let me have my own way half so much. You must not prejudice Fanny against him. I must have them love one another.”

Mary refrained from saying what she felt, and how the Admiral’s certain female companion has so changed her life to its present state of non-life. Henry had never suspected whence his sister’s vampirism came from. Meanwhile, there could not be two persons in existence whose characters and manners were less accordant that Fanny and the Admiral: time would discover it to him.

“Henry, I think so highly of Fanny Price, that if I thought the next Mrs. Crawford would have half the reason which my poor ill-used aunt had to abhor the name, I would prevent the marriage. But I know that a wife you loved would be the happiest of women. Even when you ceased to love, she would yet find in you the liberality and good-breeding of a gentleman.”

The impossibility of not doing everything in the world to make Fanny Price happy, or of ceasing to love Fanny Price, was in his eloquent answer.