ed. The sufferings which Lady Bertram did not
see had little power over her fancy; and she wrote very comfortably
about agitation, and anxiety, and poor invalids, till Tom was actually
conveyed to Mansfield, and her own eyes had beheld his altered
appearance. Then a letter which she had been previously preparing for
Fanny was finished in a different style, in the language of real feeling
and alarm; then she wrote as she might have spoken. "He is just come, my
dear Fanny, and is taken upstairs; and I am so shocked to see him, that
I do not know what to do. I am sure he has been very ill. Poor Tom! I am
quite grieved for him, and very much frightened, and so is Sir Thomas;
and how glad I should be if you were here to comfort me. But Sir
Thomas hopes he will be better to-morrow, and says we must consider his
journey."

The real solicitude now awakened in the maternal bosom was not
soon over. Tom's extreme impatience to be removed to Mansfield, and
experience those comforts of home and family which had been little
thought of in uninterrupted health, had probably induced his being
conveyed thither too early, as a return of fever came on, and for a week
he was in a more alarming state than ever. They were all very seriously
frightened. Lady Bertram wrote her daily terrors to her niece, who
might now be said to live upon letters, and pass all her time between
suffering from that of to-day and looking forward to to-morrow's.
Without any particular affection for her eldest cousin, her tenderness
of heart made her feel that she could not spare him, and the purity of
her principles added yet a keener solicitude, when she considered how
little useful, how little self-denying his life had (apparently) been.

Susan was her only companion and listener on this, as on more common
occasions. Susan was always ready to hear and to sympathise. Nobody else
could be interested in so remote an evil as illness in a family above an
hundred miles off; not even Mrs. Price, beyond a brief question or two,
if she saw her daughter with a letter in her hand, and now and then the
quiet observation of, "My poor sister Bertram must be in a great deal of
trouble."

So long divided and so differently situated, the ties of blood were
little more than nothing. An attachment, originally as tranquil as their
tempers, was now become a mere name. Mrs. Price did quite as much for
Lady Bertram as Lady Bertram would have done for Mrs. Price. Three or
four Prices