“I was not quite impartial in my judgment, Emma:—­but yet, I think—­ had you not been in the case—­I should still have distrusted him.”

When he came to Miss Woodhouse, he was obliged to read the whole of it aloud—­all that related to her, with a smile; a look; a shake of the head; a word or two of assent, or disapprobation; or merely of love, as the subject required; concluding, however, seriously, and, after steady reflection, thus—­

“Very bad—­though it might have been worse.—­Playing a most dangerous game.  Too much indebted to the event for his acquittal.—­ No judge of his own manners by you.—­Always deceived in fact by his own wishes, and regardless of little besides his own convenience.—­ Fancying you to have fathomed his secret.  Natural enough!—­ his own mind full of intrigue, that he should suspect it in others.—­Mystery; Finesse—­how they pervert the understanding!  My Emma, does not every thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other?”

Emma agreed to it, and with a blush of sensibility on Harriet’s account, which she could not give any sincere explanation of.

“You had better go on,” said she.

He did so, but very soon stopt again to say, “the pianoforte!  Ah!  That was the act of a very, very young man, one too young to consider whether the inconvenience of it might not very much exceed the pleasure.  A boyish scheme, indeed!—­I cannot comprehend a man’s wishing to give a woman any proof of affection which he knows she would rather dispense with; and he did know that she would have prevented the instrument’s coming if she could.”

After this, he made some progress without any pause.  Frank Churchill’s confession of having behaved shamefully was the first thing to call for more than a word in passing.

“I perfectly agree with you, sir,”—­was then his remark.  “You did behave very shamefully.  You never wrote a truer line.”  And having gone through what immediately followed of the basis of their disagreement, and his persisting to act in direct opposition to Jane Fairfax’s sense of right, he made a fuller pause to say, “This is very bad.—­He had induced her to place herself, for his sake, in a situation of extreme difficulty and uneasiness, and it should have been his first object to prevent her from suffering unnecessarily.—­She must have had much more to contend with, in carrying on the correspondence, than he could.  He should have respected even unreasonable scruples, had there been such; but hers were all reasonable.  We must look to her one fault, and remember that she had done a wrong thing in consenting to the engagement, to bear that she should have been in such a state of punishment.”

Emma knew that he was now getting to the Box Hill party, and grew uncomfortable.  Her own behaviour had been so very improper!  She was deeply ashamed, and a little afraid of his next look.  It was all read, however, steadily, attentively, and without the smallest remark; and, excepting one momentary glance at her, instantly withdrawn, in the fear of giving pain—­no remembrance of Box Hill seemed to exist.