Colonel Fitzwilliam hardly knew how he got away, what his three friends thought of him, or what General Stuart, whom he had met outside the lobby, could comprehend of his excuses for his abrupt departure. He only knew that he could not return to his place, watching the woman who possessed his whole heart in the company of the lover to whom she had promised herself. He must be alone, in the darkness and silence, to brace himself to endure the shock of what he had heard and realize all that would follow from it. He hastened through the streets, and shut himself up in his rooms, conscious only that this was a defeat, not a mere repulse such as he had received at Bath, but a defeat the completeness and finality of which admitted no rally on the losing side. Long he paced his room, struggling to fight down the anguish of his mind and to see clearly through his utter wretchedness what had happened and how. Even in the midst of his sufferings it was not difficult for him to piece together all the items of his knowledge into a connected whole. She had wearied of him at Bath; that must have been the beginning of it; he had not been able to gain her affection in a sufficient degree for it to be proof against Lady Catherine's attack. That catastrophe had swept him, equally with his cousins, away from whatever place he had held in Mary Crawford's esteem; and when he met her again in London, and could resume his efforts to recover that place, it was already occupied. Was that, then, why she had seemed not to wish to be too friendly--because it was too late? He was forced to believe it; he could indeed easily believe anything that was a proof against her consideration, her goodness of heart, that had endeavoured to save him pain. He could and did believe that he had failed to win her, but that she could have accepted Sir Walter Elliot left him for many hours stunned and incredulous. That she, with her many gifts of mind and body, her true elegance, her sensibility, her refinement of breeding, placing her in almost a different world from the vulgar pretentiousness of Sir Walter and his daughter, which in Bath had so often seemed uncongenial to her, should now actually find such a man all-sufficient, and should consent to join her life with his, was an outrage, a madness--all the more so if she had drifted into it in the way the onlookers imagined. She could not know what she was doing. Her friends--what were they about? She must be warned. Fitzwilliam impulsively strode to the door, then stopped and flung himself down with a bitter laugh at his own folly--he to be raging through all the commonplace jealousies of a rejected lover, like any boy of nineteen! What could he or anyone else do? Miss Crawford was perfectly free to choose; she had a brother, with whose knowledge she was probably acting, and there was nothing to be alleged against Sir Walter Elliot's character. Recollecting the comments he had heard that evening, Fitzwilliam was forced to the same