第123章[第1页/共4页]

“La!”replied Kitty,“it looks just like that man that used to be with him before.Mr.what's-his-name.That tall,proud man.”

Elizabeth said as little to either as civility would allow,and sat down again to her work,with an eagerness which it did not often command.She had ventured only one glance at Darcy.He looked serious,as usual;and,she thought,more as he had been used to look in Hertfordshire, than as she had seen him at Pemberley. But, perhaps he could not in her mother's presence be what he was before her uncle and aunt. It was a painful, but not an improbable,conjecture.

“Good gracious! Mr. Darcy!―and so it does, I vow.Well, any friend of Mr. Bingley's will always be welcome here, to be sure;but else I must say that I hate the very sight of him.”

“I begin to be sorry that he comes at all,”said Jane to her sister.“It would be nothing;I could see him with perfect indifference, but I can hardly bear to hear it thus perpetually talked of. My mother means well;but she does not know,no one can know,how much I suffer from what she says.Happy shall I be,when his stay at Netherfield is over!”

Jane looked at Elizabeth with surprise and concern.She knew but little of their meeting in Derbyshire, and therefore felt for the awkwardness which must attend her sister, in seeing him almost for the first time after receiving his explanatory letter. Both sisters were uncomfortable enough.Each felt for the other, and of course for themselves; and their mother talked on, of her dislike of Mr. Darcy, and her resolution to be civil to him only as Mr. Bingley's friend, without being heard by either of them.But Elizabeth had sources of uneasiness which could not be suspected by Jane, to whom she had never yet had courage to shew Mrs. Gardiner's letter, or to relate her own change of sentiment towards him.To Jane,he could be only a man whose proposals she had refused,and whose merit she had undervalued;but to her own more extensive information, he was the person to whom the whole family were indebted for the first of benefits, and whom she regarded herself with an interest,if not quite so tender,at least as reasonable and just as what Jane felt for Bingley. Her astonishment at his coming―at his coming to Netherfield,to Longbourn,and voluntarily seeking her again,was almost equal to what she had known on first witnessing his altered behaviour in Derbyshire.