rned and Anne rose to go. She was earnestly invited to stay dinner.
A note was despatched to Camden Place, and she staid--staid till ten at
night; and during that time the husband and wife, either by the wife's
contrivance, or by simply going on in their usual way, were frequently
out of the room together--gone upstairs to hear a noise, or downstairs to
settle their accounts, or upon the landing to trim the lamp. And these
precious moments were turned to so good an account that all the most
anxious feelings of the past were gone through. Before they parted at
night, Anne had the felicity of being assured that in the first place (so
far from being altered for the worse), she had gained inexpressibly in
personal loveliness; and that as to character, hers was now fixed on his
mind as _perfection_ itself, maintaining the just medium of fortitude and
gentleness--that he had never ceased to love and prefer her, though it
had been only at Uppercross that he had learnt to do her justice, and
only at Lyme that he had begun to understand his own feelings; that at
Lyme he had received lessons of more than one kind--the passing
admiration of Mr. Elliot had at least _roused_ him, and the scene on the
Cobb, and at Captain Harville's, had fixed her superiority. In his
preceding attempts to attach himself to Louisa Musgrove (the attempts of
anger and pique), he protested that he had continually felt the
impossibility of really caring for Louisa, though till _that day_, till
the leisure for reflection which followed it, he had not understood the
perfect excellence of the mind with which Louisa's could so ill bear
comparison; or the perfect, the unrivalled hold it possessed over his
own. There he had learnt to distinguish between the steadiness of
principle and the obstinacy of self-will, between the darings of
heedlessness and the resolution of a collected mind; there he had seen
everything to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost, and there
had begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment,
which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way. From
that period to the present had his penance been the most severe. He had
no sooner been free from the horror and remorse attending the first few
days of Louisa's accident, no sooner had begun to feel himself alive
again, than he had begun to feel himself, though alive, not at liberty.

He found that he was considered by his friend Harville an eng