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“I think we have said all we came to say, Mr. Willoughby. We shall not stay.” She turned to Marianne. “Mrs. Brandon, I am obliged to you. I am not certain that I should have been so civil.”

“I am not certain that I was civil at all.”

“In a ballroom,” said Sophia Willoughby, “it is precisely the same thing. We shall communicate by means of correspondence soon. Please be expecting a letter. Come,” she instructed Mr. Willoughby.

And she inclined her head, with a small, formal, quite unsmiling courtesy that had, at its very heart, a kind of respect; and led away her husband through the crowd, with her chin up, and her grey silk skirts swaying, and the faint, remote, and wholly incongruous air of a woman who has won a large and expensive point at cards.

Chapter XXIII.

“I cannot say I enjoyed the evening,” said the Colonel, in the carriage.

It was two in the morning, and the streets of Mayfair were dark and wet; the lamps were making long, shivering streaks upon the pavement, and the wheels went, with a steady sound, over the stones. Elinor was opposite, with her hands folded in her lap, and Mrs. Dashwood in the corner, nodding, with her bonnet askew. Marianne had not spoken for ten minutes. She sat with her cloak pulled about her, and her hands pressed together between her knees.

“No,” agreed Marianne.

Elinor leaned across, without a word, and put both hands about her sister’s, and held them, hard, till the worst of it had gone by.

“You were magnificent,” said Elinor, quietly.

“I was not. I meant to be quite cold.”

“I know you did.”

“But I could not — Elinor, he is a man who appeared frightened and has a wife who is cleverer than he is. And all I could think of was that I pitied him. For he is a coward who has missed out on knowing the most wonderful child. How I count it as my very good fortune that I am not tied to such a man!”

The Colonel’s face beamed with love for his wife. “And we have the very great fortune of having that wonderful child in our lives because I have the most wonderful wife there ever was.”

“Indeed, you do,” Elinor added with one last squeeze of her sister’s hand just as the carriage turned into Brook Street, and stopped.

Marianne did not go to bed. She stood for a long time upon the landing outside the little room at the top of the stairs, with a candle in her hand, and the door ajar. He was sleeping quite flat, on his back, with one arm thrown over his head, and the string of a kite wound about his wrist; and the candlelight moved softly upon a face that was, in sleep, no one’s face but a child’s. He had a small scab on his chin. He had on the pillow beside him, in some kind of confusion, a wooden horse, a Latin grammar, and a packet of peppermints in a twist of paper, which were unmistakably Mrs. Smith’s.

He will have to be told, by us, before someone else does the telling, thought Marianne. He has a right to know who his father is and will have to be asked if he wants to know. And she knew, standing there in the dark, with the candle guttering in her hand, that she would rather have been asked to go over a waterfall.

She stood there a long time.

It was Edward Ferrars, in the end, who gave the advice; and he gave it, as he gave most things, unasked, in a low voice, in the parsonage manner, standing at the window of the small back drawing-room in Brook Street with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the mews.

They had sat up till nearly four. It was now barely nine in the morning of the twenty-ninth, and the little party had assembled over the breakfast things, in a state that Mrs. Dashwood described as haggard, and Elinor, more accurately, as exhausted; the Colonel had eaten nothing, and Marianne had eaten a great deal, with the air of a person laying in supplies for a siege. The children had been sent to the nursery, in charge of Mary; and it had been resolved, after some discussion, that the matter was one on which the whole family should be heard.

“I do not know what to do,” said Marianne. She had said it three times already, and she said it now quite frankly, with her chin in her hand. “I know what I think. I think he must be told. He has a right; I think he has more right than any of us. But I do not know how much to say, or in what words. He is ten years old. And I am so afraid, Edward. Too many people have seen the resemblance. It is undeniable. I do not want him to hear it in a cruel way; I know we must be the ones to tell him, and yet I am so afraid for him to know.”

Edward was silent for a moment. He was, at forty, not much changed from the shy, grave young man who had sat, once, in a small cottage in Devonshire, and said almost nothing for a fortnight; but he was a good deal surer, and his diffidence had ripened into something that was very like a quiet authority. He turned round.

“I do not think you can do it wrongly, if you tell him the truth,” said he. “I should tell him all that he can hold. A child of ten will take a great deal more than we suppose; it is the not being told that hurts them. It is a sense that there is a room in the house they are not allowed into. And I should not decide for him.” He paused. “Nor out of anger. That is the only thing I should beg of you, Marianne. It is hard on any of us to think of the man without getting angry. Especially you and Brandon. But please, don’t let the boy see it.”

“I am not angry.”

“Then it will be easier,” said Edward simply.

She looked at him for a long moment. And then she said, in a small clear voice, “Thank you,” and got up from the table, and went across to the bell.

Later that afternoon found Colonel Brandon and Edward Ferrars walking together in the park while their children were acting out one of Sarah’s latest stories, upon the lawn.

For some minutes they spoke of nothing more serious than the weather, the late hour at which they had retired.

At length Edward glanced sideways at his companion.

“Am I to understand that Mr. Willoughby appeared remarkably subdued last night?”