The colour which had been driven from her face,returned for half a minute with an additional glow,and a smile of delight added lustre to her eyes,as she thought for that space of time that his affection and wishes must still be unshaken.But she would not be secure.
“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!”
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.
Elizabeth, particularly, who knew that her mother owed to the latter the preservation of her favourite daughter from irremediable infamy, was hurt and distressed to a most painful degree by a distinction so ill applied.