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though I know you must fifty times. That tooth of her's
and those freckles. Freckles do not disgust me so very much
as they do him. I have known a face not materially disfigured by a few,
but he abominates them. You must have heard him notice
Mrs Clay's freckles."

"There is hardly any personal defect," replied Anne,
"which an agreeable manner might not gradually reconcile one to."

"I think very differently," answered Elizabeth, shortly;
"an agreeable manner may set off handsome features, but can never
alter plain ones. However, at any rate, as I have a great deal more
at stake on this point than anybody else can have, I think it
rather unnecessary in you to be advising me."

Anne had done; glad that it was over, and not absolutely hopeless
of doing good. Elizabeth, though resenting the suspicion,
might yet be made observant by it.

The last office of the four carriage-horses was to draw Sir Walter,
Miss Elliot, and Mrs Clay to Bath. The party drove off in very good spirits;
Sir Walter prepared with condescending bows for all the afflicted
tenantry and cottagers who might have had a hint to show themselves,
and Anne walked up at the same time, in a sort of desolate tranquillity,
to the Lodge, where she was to spend the first week.

Her friend was not in better spirits than herself. Lady Russell felt this
break-up of the family exceedingly. Their respectability was
as dear to her as her own, and a daily intercourse had become
precious by habit. It was painful to look upon their deserted grounds,
and still worse to anticipate the new hands they were to fall into;
and to escape the solitariness and the melancholy of so altered a village,
and be out of the way when Admiral and Mrs Croft first arrived,
she had determined to make her own absence from home begin
when she must give up Anne. Accordingly their removal was made together,
and Anne was set down at Uppercross Cottage, in the first stage
of Lady Russell's journey.

Uppercross was a moderate-sized village, which a few years back
had been completely in the old English style, containing only
two houses superior in appearance to those of the yeomen and labourers;
the mansion of the squire, with its high walls, great gates, and old trees,
substantial and unmodernized, and the compact, tight parsonage,
enclosed in its own neat garden, with a vine and a pear-tree
trained round its casements; but upon the marriage of the young 'squire,
it had received the improvement of a farm-house elevated into a cottage,
for his residence, and Uppercross Cottage, with its veranda,
French windows, and other prettiness, was quite as likely to catch
the traveller's eye as the more consistent and considerable aspect
and premises of the Great House, about a quarter of a mile farther on.

Here Anne had often been staying. She knew the ways of Uppercross
as well as those of Kellynch. The two families were so continually meeting,
so much in the habit of running in and out of each other's house

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