Emma was not prepared for this development.  It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!  Which desirable consummation was brought about at their next interview; for, after trying to console her for the abominable conduct of Frank Churchill, under the mistaken impression that that young gentleman had succeeded in engaging her affections, Mr. Knightley proposed marriage to her, and was accepted.  As for Harriet, she was invited, at Emma’s suggestion, to spend a fortnight with Mr. and Mrs. John Knightley in Brunswick Square, and there, meeting Mr. Robert Martin, through Mr. George Knightley’s contrivance, was easily persuaded to become his wife.

About this same time, too, Mrs. Weston’s husband and friends were all made happy by knowing her to be the mother of a little girl; while Emma and Mrs. Weston were enabled to take a more lenient view of Frank Churchill’s conduct, thanks to a long letter which he wrote to the latter lady in which he apologised for his equivocal conduct to Emma, and expressed his regret that those attentions should have caused such poignant distress to the lady whom he was shortly to make his wife.  The much discussed pianoforte had been his gift.

* * * * *

Persuasion

Jane Austen began her last book soon after she had finished “Emma,” and completed it in August, 1816.  “Persuasion” is connected with “Northanger Abbey” not only by the fact that the two books were originally bound up in one volume and published together two years later, and are still so issued, but in the circumstance that in both stories the scene is laid partly in Bath, a health resort with which Jane Austen was well acquainted, as having been her place of residence from the year 1801 till 1805.

I.—­The Vain Baronet of Kellynch Hall

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage.  There he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations derived from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf was powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.  This was the page at which the favourite volume always opened: 

    “ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH HALL.”