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“That is Ohio.”

He nodded, as one who has had his suspicions confirmed. He then drew from an inner pocket a sheet of folded paper, considerably creased, and unfolded it, and spread it on the top of a bollard; and Margaret, looking over his shoulder, read, in a laborious and upright hand with a great many capital letters:

AGREEMENT between Henry (the Undersigned) and Miss M. Dashwood, concerning ONE PEBBLE. Item, that the said Pebble shall be Returned in the same Condition as when Lent, excepting the Ordinary Wear of Travel. Item, that it shall not be Lost. Item, that if it is Lost, the said Miss M. Dashwood shall Bring another as Good. Item, a Clause about the Sieve.

“I put that in after your letter,” said Henry. “I thought it was only fair. You are to sign here, and here.”

She signed it, upon the rail of the gangway, with a stub of pencil, in the presence of a considerable audience; and Henry folded the paper very carefully and put it in his pocket. Then his face, which had been solemn with business, suddenly crumpled; and he flung both arms round her waist and buried his head in her gown, and said, in a voice that was very muffled, “I did think you might not come back.”

“I said I would.”

“People say things.”

“I do not,” said Margaret; and she held him hard, with her chin on his tousled head, and looked over it at the people coming down the quay. There was Marianne, running, in her fur-trimmed pelisse, with her bonnet gone and her dark hair flying and her hands out, exactly as she had once run down the hill at Barton; and Elinor, behind her, walking very fast, with her handkerchief at her mouth; and a small and round and solemn girl who was clearly Anne, and two other girls, one tall, one short, and a small boy in a great deal of muffler, who was clinging to the coat-tails of a tall stooping gentleman in grey. Somebody was laughing, and somebody was crying, and one of them, Margaret discovered, was herself.

“You are as brown as a berry,” said Marianne, when she could speak, and held her at arm’s length, and laughed and wept. “You are as thin as a rake. You have got a scar. Oh, Margaret, I have never been so — you have no idea how —”

“I have,” said Margaret. “I have every idea. Marianne, you look — you look —”

She could not find the word. She had come home, in her heart, to a sister of twenty, with a bright, unsteady beauty that had flared, and been checked, and had steadied into something more reliable. She had not been prepared for the woman of thirty who stood before her. There was hardly a line upon that beautiful face, and a stillness in the dark eyes which had not been there when she was nineteen; but the whole was so fine, and so warm, and so entirely lit from within, that the labourers upon the quay had stopped their work to look, and a young sailor on the Courier had dropped a coil of rope on his own foot.

“I know,” said Marianne, cheerfully as she smoothed down her hair. “It is disgraceful. Come, Elinor, tell her she must not stare.”

“I shall not tell her anything of the kind,” said Elinor, and put her arms round both.

The Colonel had taken a house in Brook Street for the Season, a tall, narrow, comfortable house with a fanlight and a black-and-white marble hall, which was found in the course of the first week to be very much too small for the party it was required to hold. There were nine persons in the family, without counting servants; and it was a matter of daily astonishment to the housekeeper, a person of great gravity from a Delaford family, to observe how large a space could be filled by three small girls, one boy of four, and a tortoiseshell cat that had, in some manner, made the journey from Dorsetshire in a hat-box. But nobody minded. The children were happy; Mrs. Dashwood, who had been moved from Bedford Square with her rosewood boxes to the second-floor front, was happy; and Margaret, who had been allotted a small back room overlooking the mews, and who lay awake in it for three nights listening to the noises of London with an expression of the most complete contentment, was happiest of all.

On the fourth day they dined at Mrs. Jennings’s.

It was, by general consent, to be a family occasion; and it proved, in the event, to be something a good deal more than that. Mrs. Jennings was seventy-six, and a little deaf, and had not, in twenty years, lost any of her taste for a large table; she had summoned to Berkeley Street, for the purpose of welcoming home the traveller, every member of the extended connection that could be induced to attend, and a number who could not have escaped it. Sir John Middleton was there, larger, redder, and louder than ever, with a wife who had grown thinner and quieter in proportion; Mr. and Mrs. Palmer were there, he with the same sardonic face, she with the same irresistible giggle; and there were, at the foot of the table, in a state of well-bred gloom, the Dashwoods of Norland.

It had been some years. John Dashwood had grown stout, and a little bald, and rather more prosperous; his wife, who sat at his right hand in a gown of lilac silk, had grown thinner and a good deal more elegant, and wore an expression of the most delicate condescension, as of a person who is prepared to be gracious to relations, and would like them to know it. Beside them, in a coat of a cut that would have alarmed a Parisian, sat Mr. Robert Ferrars, a good deal stouter, with a toothpick case in his waistcoat pocket and an air of having been very much improved by marriage; and at his elbow, smiling upon the assembled company with a sweetness that made Elinor, on the opposite side of the table, quietly put down her spoon, was the former Miss Lucy Steele.

“My dear Marianne!” cried Fanny Dashwood, as the soup was served, in the tone of a woman making a great concession. “How very well you look! I declare I should hardly have known you. Quite the fashion. But you were always so — animated. And so, this is the traveller! Dear Margaret! Do tell us; I am dying to hear. John and I were saying, only the other day, that it must have been quite a shock, to be among so many Americans.”

“They were very kind,” said Margaret.

“I daresay they seem kind,” said Fanny, “at first. I do not think I should like a republic. One never knows what they will do next.”

“I trust, Margaret,” said her half-brother John, with a warm and comprehensive smile down the table, “that you were not put to any inconvenience? For my part I have always thought it a great mistake in a young woman to go abroad. But I have no doubt that you were well looked after; I know that Colonel Brandon has been so obliging as to see to that; and I must say, Colonel, that you do the family very great credit. I was saying to Fanny yesterday that Marianne has really done remarkably well for herself.”

“I am obliged to you,” said the Colonel, gravely.

“Two thousand a year, I think. Delaford is a very pretty property. I have been considering,” said John Dashwood, with a look of great weight, “whether it would not be as well to think of some little improvement at Norland — some sort of a wall, or a sunk fence — in the manner of the thing, you know. It costs money. One cannot do these things without expense. But I have always felt that a man should do what he can for his family.”

“Yes, my dear brother,” said Elinor, very softly. “I remember.”

There was a small pause at this. Mr. Palmer raised his head with an expression of the deepest amusement; and Marianne, seated between Sir John and a large dish of eels, was seen pressing her napkin very hard against her mouth.

“And this must be the dear boy!” said Mrs. Robert Ferrars, in a clear sweet carrying voice. “Colonel, is it not? The little ward? What a very fine child! Robert, do look. Do you not think he is quite remarkably like — but I shall say nothing. It is a most singular resemblance. Some people, I think, have such a look about them.”

There was a dead silence at the table. Sir John, who had been about to speak, shut his mouth. The Colonel’s hand, upon the cloth, had closed into a fist; Marianne did not move; and Mrs. Dashwood, at the top of the table, went perfectly white.

Lucy Ferrars smiled and took a spoonful of soup.

It was in the drawing-room, afterwards, over the coffee, when the gentlemen had come up, and the party had loosened into groups, and Fanny had established herself in a corner with the express purpose of being addressed by anyone who cared to do so, that Mrs. Jennings, who had contrived to seat herself next to Marianne, and who had been holding her hand for some time, lowered her voice to what she believed to be a confidential murmur and said:

“And I dare say you have heard, my dear, that Mr. Willoughby is in town.”