Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/191

 have the disposition of a fiend. But in England it was not so; among the English, she believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general, though unequal, mixture of good and bad. Upon this conviction she would not be surprised if even in Henry and Eleanor Tilney some slight imperfection might hereafter appear; and upon this conviction she need not fear to acknowledge some actual specks in the character of their father, who, though cleared from the grossly injurious suspicions which she must ever blush to have entertained, she did believe, upon serious consideration, to be not perfectly amiable."

Catherine's imaginary troubles are at an end, but there are some very real ones in store for her. Her brother's engagement with Isabella Thorpe is broken off through Isabella's hoping to secure a better match for herself; and Catherine, who receives the news in a letter from James, feels his sorrow as if it were her own. The affectionate sympathy of Henry and Eleanor has just restored her to some comfort, when a far greater blow falls. The young Tilneys have never been able to understand their father's marked partiality for Catherine, being quite unaware that when in Bath he had received from John Thorpe a glowing account of her parents' position and her future expectations. Thorpe had at that time intended to marry her himself, and, as his sister was also on the eve of an engagement to her brother, his vanity had led him into telling the General a series of untruths, all tending to the glorification of the Morland family.

While Catherine is at Northanger Abbey General Tilney goes to London for a week, and there again encounters Thorpe, who being by this time greatly angered at the failure of all the projected marriages