A meeting between Marianne Dashwood and John Willoughby at last took place at a fashionable party, where the latter greeted the two sisters with great coldness and reluctance; and a third letter from Marianne, now frantic with grief, elicited a reply from him in which he announced his engagement to another lady, “reproached himself for not having been more guarded in his professions of esteem for Marianne, and returned, with great regret, the lock of her hair which she had so obligingly bestowed on him.”

A day or two later Colonel Brandon called on Elinor to give her certain information about Willoughby.  He told her that his sudden departure from Devonshire to London, which had surprised his friends so much, had been due to an affecting letter he had received from his ward, Miss Williams, the natural daughter of a beloved sister-in-law.  Willoughby had met this lady—­a pretty girl of sixteen—­at Bath, and, after a guilty intimacy, had abandoned her.  Colonel Brandon had gone to her rescue and to fight a bloodless duel with her betrayer.

III.—­Matrimonial Intrigues

One day Elinor and Marianne were at Gray’s, in Sackville Street, carrying on a negotiation for the exchange of a few old-fashioned jewels belonging to their mother, when they came upon their half-brother, Mr. John Dashwood.  He paid a visit to Mrs. Jennings the next day, and came with a pretence of an apology for his wife not coming, too.  To his sisters his manners, though calm, were perfectly kind; to Mrs. Jennings most attentively civil; and on Colonel Brandon coming in soon after himself, he eyed him with a curiosity that seemed to say that he only wanted to know him to be rich to be equally civil to him.  After staying with them half an hour, he asked Elinor to walk with him to Conduit Street, and to introduce him to Sir John and Lady Middleton; and as soon as they were out of the house he began to make inquiries about Colonel Brandon.  Which inquiries having elicited the satisfactory information that the gentleman had a good property at Delaford Park, in Dorsetshire, Mr. Dashwood—­indifferent to his sister’s disclaimers —­proceeded to congratulate her on the prospect of a very respectable establishment in life, to insist that the objections to a prior attachment on her side were not insurmountable, and to inform her that the object of that attachment—­Mr. Edward Ferrars—­was likely to be married to Miss Morton, a peer’s daughter, with thirty thousand pounds of her own.

Mrs. John Dashwood had so much confidence in her husband’s judgment that she waited the very next day on both Mrs. Jennings and her daughter.  She found the former by no means unworthy her notice, and the latter one of the most charming women in the world.  The attraction was mutual, for Lady Middleton was equally pleased with Mrs. Dashwood.