“I like to hear your enthusiasm, Fanny. It is a lovely night, and they are much to be pitied who have not been taught to feel, in some degree, as you do; who have not, at least, been given a taste for Nature in early life. They lose a great deal.”
“You taught me to think and feel on the subject, cousin.”
“I had a very apt scholar. There’s Arcturus looking very bright.”
“Yes, and the Bear. I wish I could see Cassiopeia.”
“We must go out on the lawn for that. Should you be afraid?”
“Not in the least. It is a great while since we have had any star-gazing.”
“Yes; I do not know how it has happened.” The glee began. “We will stay till this is finished, Fanny,” said he, turning his back on the window; and as it advanced, she had the mortification of seeing him advance too, moving forward by gentle degrees towards the instrument, and when it ceased, he was close by the singers, among the most urgent in requesting to hear the glee again.
Fanny sighed alone at the window till scolded away by Mrs. Norris’s threats of catching cold.
CHAPTER XII
Sir Thomas was to return in November, and his eldest son had duties to call him earlier home. The approach of September brought tidings of Mr. Bertram, first in a letter to the gamekeeper and then in a letter to Edmund; and by the end of August he arrived himself, to be gay, agreeable, and gallant again as occasion served, or Miss Crawford demanded; to tell of races and Weymouth, and parties and friends, to which she might have listened six weeks before with some interest, and altogether to give her the fullest conviction, by the power of actual comparison, of her preferring his younger brother.