“Let me first see how he behaves,”said she;“it will then be early enough for expectation.”
“Good gracious! Mr. Darcy!―and so it does, I vow.Well, any friend of Mr. Bingley's will always be welcome here, to be sure;but else I must say that I hate the very sight of him.”
Mr. Bingley arrived. Mrs. Bennet, through the assistance of servants, contrived to have the earliest tidings of it, that the period of anxiety and fretfulness on her side might be as long as it could.She counted the days that must intervene before their invitation could be sent;hopeless of seeing him before. But on the third morning after his arrival in Hertfordshire,she saw him, from her dressing-room window,enter the paddock and ride towards the house.
“I wish I could say anything to comfort you,”replied Elizabeth;“but it is wholly out of my power.You must feel it;and the usual satisfaction of preaching patience to a sufferer is denied me, because you have always so much.”
Elizabeth said as little to either as civility would allow,and sat down again to her work,with an eagerness which it did not often command.She had ventured only one glance at Darcy.He looked serious,as usual;and,she thought,more as he had been used to look in Hertfordshire, than as she had seen him at Pemberley. But, perhaps he could not in her mother's presence be what he was before her uncle and aunt. It was a painful, but not an improbable,conjecture.