“But Edmund, how can you think this way?” said Fanny to him in secret. “A connexion to the vampire’s brother! He, as indifferent of heart as she is, if still breathing. Even now his declarations of love ring hollow—for how can he know of love? The true love that a true man alone might feel? Henry is not true, but false as sun’s last glimmer at twilight. How, then, can you think him changed or be in earnest after the way he had behaved, falsely encouraging your cousins?”

Edmund’s brow darkened once more. “Again, Fanny! You speak of unholy vampires, and I refuse this, utterly, with all my heart. It is not so, she is not—”

“Oh, cousin.”

And Fanny looked away in sadness.

Crawford called the next day. With Edmund’s return, Sir Thomas felt himself at better liberty to ask him to stay for dinner.

Edmund had then ample opportunity to observe how Mr. Crawford was with Fanny. He noted that any encouragement from Fanny rested upon her embarrassment only. He was almost ready to wonder at his friend’s perseverance.

Fanny was worth it all—worth every effort of patience, every exertion of mind—but he did not think he could have gone on himself with any woman breathing, without something more to warm his courage than his eyes could discern in hers. But then, Edmund fundamentally did not look upon courtship as a competitive sport.

In the evening a few circumstances occurred which he thought more promising. When he and Crawford walked into the drawing-room, his mother and Fanny were sitting intently and silently at work.

“We have not been so silent all the time,” said his mother. “Fanny has been reading to me, and only put the book down upon hearing you coming.” And sure enough there was a book on the table: a volume of Shakespeare. “She often reads to me; and she was in the middle of a very fine speech of that man’s—what’s his name, Fanny?—when we heard your footsteps.”

Crawford took the volume. “Let me have the pleasure of finishing that speech to your ladyship,” said he. “I shall find it immediately.” And by artifice he did find it, within a page or two, near enough to satisfy Lady Bertram, who assured him, as soon as he mentioned the name of Cardinal Wolsey, that was it.

Not a look or an offer of help had Fanny given. All attention to her work, she was determined to be disinterested.

But taste was too strong in her. Five minutes into his reading, she was forced to listen—his reading was capital, and her pleasure in good reading extreme. To good reading, she had been long used: her uncle, her cousins, all read well, Edmund very well. But in Mr. Crawford’s reading there was a variety of excellence beyond what she had ever met with.