MARIANNE'S illness, though weakening in its kind.
had not been long enough to make her recovery slow;
and with youth, natural strength, and her mother's
presence in aid, it proceeded so smoothly as to enable her
to remove, within four days after the arrival of the latter,
into Mrs. Palmer's dressing-room. When there, at her
own particular request, for she was impatient to pour
forth her thanks to him for fetching her mother, Colonel
Brandon was invited to visit her.

His emotion in entering the room, in seeing her
altered looks, and in receiving the pale hand which she
immediately held out to him, was such, as, in Elinor's
conjecture, must arise from something more than his
affection for Marianne, or the consciousness of its being
known to others; and she soon discovered in his melan-
choly eye and varying complexion as he looked at her
sister, the probable recurrence of many past scenes of
misery to his mind, brought back by that resemblance
between Marianne and Eliza already acknowledged, and
now strengthened by the hollow eye, the sickly skin,
the posture of reclining weakness, and the warm acknow-
ledgment of peculiar obligation.

Mrs. Dashwood, not less watchful of what passed than
her daughter, but with a mind very differently influenced,
and therefore watching to very different effect, saw
nothing in the Colonel's behaviour but what arose from
the most simple and self-evident sensations, while in
the actions and words of Marianne she persuaded herself
to think that something more than gratitude already
dawned.

At the end of another day or two, Marianne growing
visibly stronger every twelve hours, Mrs. Dashwood,
urged equally by her own and her daughter's wishes,

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