Page:Austen - Sense and Sensibility, vol. II, 1811.djvu/132

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from one, or discerned objects through the other; and Marianne, seated at the foot of the bed, with her head leaning against one of its posts, again took up Willoughby’s letter, and, after shuddering over every sentence, exclaimed—

“It is too much! Oh! Willoughby, Willoughby, could this be your’s! Cruel, cruel—nothing can acquit you. Elinor, nothing can. Whatever he might have heard against me—ought he not to have suspended his belief? ought he not to have told me of it, to have given me the power of clearing myself? ‘The lock of hair, (repeating it from the letter,) which you so obligingly bestowed on me’—That is unpardonable. Willoughby, where was your heart, when you wrote those words? Oh! barbarously insolent!—Elinor, can he be justified?”

“No,