Fanny was out of spirits all the rest of the day. It did not help that Susan constantly cornered her in private and asked giddy, giggling, pointed questions about the two exciting gentlemen of their acquaintance—Mr. Crawford and the terribly handsome and mysterious Lord Eastwind—until Fanny wanted to hide.

Though tolerably secure of not seeing Mr. Crawford again, she could not help being low. It was parting with somebody of the nature of a friend. And though, in one light, Fanny was glad to have him gone, it seemed she was now deserted by everybody. It was a sort of renewed separation from Mansfield. And she could not think of his returning to town, and being frequently with Mary and Edmund, without feelings so near akin to envy as made her hate herself for having them.

Her dejection had no abatement from anything passing around her. A friend or two of her father’s spent the long, long evening there; and from six o’clock till half-past nine, there was little intermission of noise or grog, or talk of the “pockmarked villainous rabble” out on the streets these days (the mummies were now seen more frequently in all parts of town).

She was very low. The wonderful improvement which she still fancied in Mr. Crawford was the nearest to administering comfort of anything within the current of her thoughts. Not considering in how different a circle she had been just seeing him, nor how much might be owing to contrast, she was quite persuaded of his being astonishingly more gentle and regardful of others than formerly.

And, if in little things, must it not be so in great? So anxious for her health and comfort, so very feeling as he now expressed himself, and really seemed—might not it be fairly supposed that he would not much longer persevere in a suit so distressing to her?

Fanny dared thus to hope—at the same time as she dared not to think of a pair of intimate, sorrowful, ancient eyes. . . .

Chapter XLIII

It was presumed that Mr. Crawford was travelling back to London on the morrow, for nothing more was seen of him at Mr. Price’s. And two days afterwards, it was a fact ascertained to Fanny by a letter from his sister, opened and read by her, on another account, with the most anxious curiosity:—