This dreadful communication could not be kept from the rest of the family. Sir Thomas set off, Edmund would go with him, and the others had been left in a state of wretchedness, inferior only to what followed the receipt of the next letters from London. Everything was by that time public beyond a hope. The servant of Mrs. Rushworth, the mother, had exposure in her power, and supported by her mistress (and the gut-wrenching howls of her young master), was not to be silenced. The two ladies, even in the short time they had been together, had disagreed; and the bitterness of the elder against her daughter-in-law might perhaps arise almost as much from the personal disrespect with which she had herself been treated as from sensibility for her son.

However that might be, she was unmanageable. But had she been less obstinate, or of less weight with her son, who was always guided by the last speaker, by the person who could get hold of and shut him up (or, in case of the moon, guided by a bright shining object), the situation would still have been hopeless—for the young Mrs. Rushworth did not appear again, and there was every reason to conclude her to be concealed somewhere with Mr. Crawford, who had quitted his uncle’s house, as for a journey, on the very day of her absenting herself.

Sir Thomas, however, remained yet a little longer in town, in the hope of discovering and snatching her from further vice, though all was lost on the side of character.

His present state Fanny could hardly bear to think of. There was but one of his children who was not at this time a source of misery to him. Tom’s complaints had been greatly heightened by the shock of his sister’s conduct, and his recovery so much thrown back by it, that even Lady Bertram had been struck by the difference, and all her alarms were regularly sent off to her husband.

Julia’s elopement, the additional blow which had met Sir. Thomas on his arrival in London, though its impact had been deadened at the moment, must be sorely felt. Fanny saw that it was. His letters expressed how much he deplored it. Under any circumstances it would have been an unwelcome alliance. But to have it so clandestinely formed, and at such a time, placed Julia’s feelings in a most unfavourable light, and aggravated the folly of her choice. Sir Thomas called it a bad thing, done in the worst manner, and at the worst time. And though Julia was more pardonable than Maria (being folly rather than vice), he regarded the step she had taken as opening the worst probabilities of a conclusion very like her sister’s.