Fanny sighed alone at the window till scolded away
by Mrs. Norris's threats of catching cold.



CHAPTER XII

Sir Thomas was to return in November, and his eldest
son had duties to call him earlier home. The approach
of September brought tidings of Mr. Bertram, first in a
letter to the gamekeeper and then in a letter to Edmund;
and by the end of August he arrived himself, to be gay,
agreeable, and gallant again as occasion served,
or Miss Crawford demanded; to tell of races and Weymouth,
and parties and friends, to which she might have listened
six weeks before with some interest, and altogether
to give her the fullest conviction, by the power
of actual comparison, of her preferring his younger brother.

It was very vexatious, and she was heartily sorry for it;
but so it was; and so far from now meaning to marry
the elder, she did not even want to attract him beyond
what the simplest claims of conscious beauty required:
his lengthened absence from Mansfield, without anything
but pleasure in view, and his own will to consult, made it
perfectly clear that he did not care about her; and his
indifference was so much more than equalled by her own,
that were he now to step forth the owner of Mansfield Park,
the Sir Thomas complete, which he was to be in time, she did