she will be within an easy distance of me

Her daughter could not quite agree with her; but her dissent was not heard, and therefore gave no offence. "At Delaford, she will be within an easy distance of me," added Mrs. Dashwood, "even if I remain at Barton; and in all probabilityfor I hear it is a large village- indeed there certainly must be some small house or cottage close by, that would suit us quite as well as our present situation." Poor Elinor!- here was a new scheme for getting her to Delaford!- but her spirit was stubborn. "His fortune too!- for at my time of life, you know, every body cares about that;- and though I neither know, nor desire to know, what it really is, I am sure it must be a good one." Here they were interrupted by the entrance of a third person; and Elinor withdrew to think it all over in private, to wish success to her friend, and yet, in wishing it, to feel a pang for Willoughby. Chapter 46 MARIANNE'S illness, though weakening in its kind, had not been long enough to make her recovery slow; and with youth, natural strength, and her mother's presence in aid, it proceeded so smoothly as to enable her to remove, within four days after the arrival of the latter, into Mrs. Palmer's dressing-room. When there, at her own particular request, for she was impatient to pour forth her thanks to him for fetching her mother, Colonel Brandon was invited to visit her. His emotion on entering the room, in seeing her altered looks, and in receiving the pale hand which she immediately held out to him, was such as, in Elinor's conjecture, must arise from something more than his affection for Marianne, or the consciousness of its being known to others; and she soon discovered, in his melancholy eye and varying complexion as he looked at her sister, the probable recurrence of many past scenes of misery to his mind, brought back by that resemblance between Marianne and Eliza already acknowledged, and now strengthened by the hollow eye, the sickly skin, the posture of reclining weakness; and the warm acknowledgment of peculiar obligation. Mrs. Dashwood, not less watchful of what passed than her daughter, but with a mind very differently influenced, and therefore watching to very different effect, saw nothing in the Colonel's behaviour but what arose from the most simple and self-evident sensations, while in the actions and words of Marianne she persuaded herself to think that something more than gratitude already dawned.