described its deficiencies, and told her what he meant
to do himself towards removing them.--His behaviour
to her in this, as well as in every other particular,
his open pleasure in meeting her after an absence
of only ten days, his readiness to converse with her,
and his deference for her opinion, might very well
justify Mrs. Jennings's persuasion of his attachment,
and would have been enough, perhaps, had not Elinor still,
as from the first, believed Marianne his real favourite,
to make her suspect it herself. But as it was,
such a notion had scarcely ever entered her head,
except by Mrs. Jennings's suggestion; and she could
not help believing herself the nicest observer of the
two;--she watched his eyes, while Mrs. Jennings thought
only of his behaviour;--and while his looks of anxious
solicitude on Marianne's feeling, in her head and throat,
the beginning of a heavy cold, because unexpressed by words,
entirely escaped the latter lady's observation;--SHE could
discover in them the quick feelings, and needless alarm
of a lover.

Two delightful twilight walks on the third and fourth
evenings of her being there, not merely on the dry gravel
of the shrubbery, but all over the grounds, and especially
in the most distant parts of them, where there was something
more of wildness than in the rest, where the trees were
the oldest, and the grass was the longest and wettest,
had--assisted by the still greater imprudence of sitting
in her wet shoes and stockings--given Marianne a cold
so violent as, though for a day or two trifled with