judged or to be known bj such that no private correspondence could bear the eye of others before she could recover calmness enough to return the letter which she had been meditating over and say � thank you this is full proof undoubtedly proof of everything you were saying why be acquainted with us now i can explain this too cried mrs smith smiling i have shown you mr as he was a dozen years ago and i will show him as he is now i cannot produce written proof again but i can give as testimony as you can desire of what he is now wanting and what he is now doing he is no now he truly wants to marry you his present attentions to your family are very sincere quite from the heart i will give you my authority his mend colonel colonel are you acquainted with him no it does not come to me in quite so direct a line as that it takes a bend or two but nothing of consequence the stream is as good as at first the little rubbish it in the is easily moved away mr talks to colonel of his views on you which said colonel i imagine to be in himself a sensible careful sort of character but colonel has a very pretty silly wife to whom he tells things which he had better not and he it all to her she in the overflowing spirits of her recovery it all to her nurse and the nurse very naturally brings it all to me on monday evening my good friend mrs let me thus much into the secrets of buildings when i talked of a whole history therefore you see i was not so much as you supposed my dear mrs smith your authority is deficient this will not do mr s having any views on me will not in r and p� r im w persuasion the least account for the efforts he made towards a with my father that was all prior to my coming to bath i found them on the most friendly terms when i arrived i know you did i know it all perfectly but � indeed mrs smith we must not expect to get real information in such a line facts or opinions which are to pass through the hands of so many to be by folly in one and ignorance in another can hardly have much truth left only give me a hearing you will soon be able to judge of the general credit due by listening to some particulars which you can yourself immediately contradict or confirm nobody that you were his first he had seen you indeed before he came to bath and admired you but without knowing it to be you so says my historian at least is this true did he see you last summer or autumn somewhere down in the west to use her own words without knowing it to be you he certainly did i happened to be at well continued mrs smith triumphantly grant my friend the credit due to the establishment of the first point asserted he saw you then at and liked you so well as to be exceedingly pleased to meet with you again in place as miss anne and from that moment i have no doubt had a double motive in his visits there but there was another and an earlier which i will now explain if there is anything in my story which you know to be either false or improbable stop me my account states that your sister s mend the lady now staying with you whom i have heard you mention came to bath with miss and sir walter as long ago as september in short when they first came themselves and has been staying there ever since that she is a clever handsome woman poor and plausible and altogether such as to give a general idea among sir walter s acquaintance of her meaning to he lady and as general a surprise that miss should be apparently blind to the danger here mrs smith paused a moment but had not a word to and she continued � it appeared in this light to those who knew the family long before you returned to it and colonel had his eye upon your father often enough to be sensible of it though he did not then visit in place but his regard for mr gave him an interest in watching all that was going on there and when mr came to for a day or two as he happened to do a little before christmas colonel made him acquainted with the appearance of things and the reports beginning to prevail now you are to understand that time had worked a very material change in mr s opinions as to the value of a upon all points of blood and he is a completely altered man having long had as much money as he could spend nothing to wish for on the side of or indulgence he has been gradually learning to pin his happiness upon the consequence he is heir to i thought it coming on before our acquaintance ceased but it is now a confirmed feeling he cannot bear the idea of not being sir william you may guess therefore that the news he heard om his could not be very agreeable and you may guess what it produced the resolution of coming back to as soon as possible and of fixing himself here for a time with the view of his former acquaintance and recovering such a footing in the family as might give him the means of the degree of his danger and of the lady it he found it material this was agreed upon between the two as the only thing to be done and colonel was to assist in every way that he could 