“How much your friends in Ireland must be enjoying your pleasure on this occasion, Miss Fairfax.  I dare say they often think of you, and wonder which will be the day, the precise day of the instrument’s coming to hand.  Do you imagine Colonel Campbell knows the business to be going forward just at this time?—­Do you imagine it to be the consequence of an immediate commission from him, or that he may have sent only a general direction, an order indefinite as to time, to depend upon contingencies and conveniences?”

He paused.  She could not but hear; she could not avoid answering,

“Till I have a letter from Colonel Campbell,” said she, in a voice of forced calmness, “I can imagine nothing with any confidence.  It must be all conjecture.”

“Conjecture—­aye, sometimes one conjectures right, and sometimes one conjectures wrong.  I wish I could conjecture how soon I shall make this rivet quite firm.  What nonsense one talks, Miss Woodhouse, when hard at work, if one talks at all;—­your real workmen, I suppose, hold their tongues; but we gentlemen labourers if we get hold of a word—­Miss Fairfax said something about conjecturing.  There, it is done.  I have the pleasure, madam, (to Mrs. Bates,) of restoring your spectacles, healed for the present.”

He was very warmly thanked both by mother and daughter; to escape a little from the latter, he went to the pianoforte, and begged Miss Fairfax, who was still sitting at it, to play something more.

“If you are very kind,” said he, “it will be one of the waltzes we danced last night;—­let me live them over again.  You did not enjoy them as I did; you appeared tired the whole time.  I believe you were glad we danced no longer; but I would have given worlds—­ all the worlds one ever has to give—­for another half-hour.”

She played.

“What felicity it is to hear a tune again which has made one happy!—­ If I mistake not that was danced at Weymouth.”

She looked up at him for a moment, coloured deeply, and played something else.  He took some music from a chair near the pianoforte, and turning to Emma, said,

“Here is something quite new to me.  Do you know it?—­Cramer.—­ And here are a new set of Irish melodies.  That, from such a quarter, one might expect.  This was all sent with the instrument.  Very thoughtful of Colonel Campbell, was not it?—­He knew Miss Fairfax could have no music here.  I honour that part of the attention particularly; it shews it to have been so thoroughly from the heart.  Nothing hastily done; nothing incomplete.  True affection only could have prompted it.”

Emma wished he would be less pointed, yet could not help being amused; and when on glancing her eye towards Jane Fairfax she caught the remains of a smile, when she saw that with all the deep blush of consciousness, there had been a smile of secret delight, she had less scruple in the amusement, and much less compunction with respect to her.—­This amiable, upright, perfect Jane Fairfax was apparently cherishing very reprehensible feelings.