As though nothing had happened, Miss Crawford tried to speak as before, with an air of fondness. “Truly, I meant no harm! Indeed, I say this again; I hate to leave you. I shall see no one half so amiable where I am going. Who says we shall not be sisters? I feel that we are born to be connected; and those tears you shed, convince me that you felt it too, dear Fanny.”

Fanny took another deep breath and resigned herself to hear out the platitudes yet again, but this time safely on her guard. Eventually she said, “But you are only going from one set of friends to another. You are going to a very particular friend.”

“Yes, very true. Mrs. Fraser has been my intimate friend for years. But I have not the least inclination to go near her. You have all so much more heart among you than one finds in the world at large.”

“Then, in Heaven’s name, why call her a friend?”

“Ah, innocent Fanny! Friends are of an altogether different species in London.”

Fanny shook her head, and firmly kept her hands on William’s cross.

After this they sat silent: Fanny meditating on the different sorts of friendship in the world, Mary on something of less philosophic tendency. She first spoke again.

“How perfectly I remember my resolving to look for you upstairs, and setting off to find my way to the East room, without having an idea whereabouts it was! How well I remember—”

Sweet Lord in Heaven! Again! At this rate, she intends to kill me with her reminiscences! thought Fanny. And she listened in pained silence, for many long moments, to a very long discourse.

Finally Miss Crawford noted her companion’s abstraction. “Why, Fanny, you are absolutely in a reverie."

Fanny opened her eyes with difficulty, wondering the other had not taken the soporific opportunity to feed on her—had she but known.

Miss Crawford switched to a topic of even more immediate pain. "Ah! You were thinking, I hope, of one who is always thinking of you. Oh! that I could transport you for a short time into our circle in town, that you might understand how your power over Henry is thought of there! Oh! the envyings and heartburnings of dozens and dozens; the wonder, the incredulity that will be felt at hearing what you have done! For as to secrecy, Henry is quite the hero of an old romance, and glories in his chains. You should come to London to know how to estimate your conquest. If you were to see how he is courted, and how I am courted for his sake!”