n afterwards, and moving different ways, Mrs. Jennings
very plainly heard Elinor say, and with a voice which showed her to
feel what she said--

"I shall always think myself very much obliged to you."

Mrs. Jennings was delighted with her gratitude, and only wondered that
after hearing such a sentence, the Colonel should be able to take
leave of them, as he immediately did, with the utmost sang-froid, and
go away without making her any reply!--She had not thought her old
friend could have made so indifferent a suitor.

What had really passed between them was to this effect.

"I have heard," said he, with great compassion, "of the injustice your
friend Mr. Ferrars has suffered from his family; for if I understand
the matter right, he has been entirely cast off by them for
persevering in his engagement with a very deserving young woman. Have
I been rightly informed?--Is it so?--"

Elinor told him that it was.

"The cruelty, the impolitic cruelty,"--he replied, with great
feeling,--"of dividing, or attempting to divide, two young people
long attached to each other, is terrible. Mrs. Ferrars does not know
what she may be doing--what she may drive her son to. I have seen Mr.
Ferrars two or three times in Harley Street, and am much pleased with
him. He is not a young man with whom one can be intimately acquainted
in a short time, but I have seen enough of him to wish him well for
his own sake, and as a friend of yours, I wish it still more. I
understand that he intends to take orders. Will you be so good as to
tell him that the living of Delaford, now just vacant, as I am
informed by this day's post, is his, if he think it worth his
acceptance--but _that_, perhaps, so unfortunately circumstanced as he
is now, it may be nonsense to appear to doubt; I only wish it were
more valuable. It is a rectory, but a small one; the late incumbent, I
believe, did not make more than 200 L per annum, and though it is
certainly capable of improvement, I fear, not to such an amount as to
afford him a very comfortable income. Such as it is, however, my
pleasure in presenting him to it, will be very great. Pray assure him
of it."

Elinor's astonishment at this commission could hardly have been
greater, had the Colonel been really making her an offer of his hand.
The preferment, which only two days before she had considered as
hopeless for Edward, was already provided to enable him to marry;--and
_she_, of all people in the world, was fi