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triumph, that the dinner need now not take place. It might be simpler – and Emma thought this with some unease – to avoid any reference to the old lady’s condition: if the daughter (and here Emma refused to think of Miss Bates’s own state, both physical and mental: the conclusion might prove too shocking and distressing) declared her mother well enough to go out in company, then surely that should begood enough for the hosts? It was hard indeed to decide which to do. In the meantime, Mrs. Bates’s spectacles were in pieces: it was Emma’s duty, without a doubt, to find a man with some knowledge of putting them together again; and it was with considerable relief that Emma saw Mr. Perry walking up the street, his doctor’s bag in one hand and the other waving genially at her as he came.
    â€œMy dear Mrs. Knightley! It is some weeks since I was last at the Abbey, and on that occasion it was to bring James better news of his daughter Hannah’s prospects for recovery. You are all well, I trust?”
    â€œYes,” replied Emma, who was here able to smile with a degree of complacency – for the coachman James, brought by her from Hartfield at the time of Mr. Woodhouse’s death, had suffered agonies at the fever of his daughter Hannah, employed at Randalls; and Emma, just as much as Mr. Perry, had ministered to the sick girl with calf’s foot jelly and the cold compresses advised by her father’s old doctor. “We are in splendid health at Donwell Abbey. But—” and here Emma lowered her voice, so Mr. Perry, standing in the street, walked along several feet to hear her. “But I am just come from Miss Bates and her mother. I was most awkward, I stepped too fast on their shaky floor and a pair of spectacles were broken—”
    â€œDo not fret,” said Mr. Perry, and in his tones Emmaremembered the wrappings-up against the winter cold, at her father’s house, and the measles and chicken-pox all attended by him, with Mrs. Weston in tow; and she smiled most entrancingly, once again. From the corner of her eye she could see a movement in the street, otherwise so quiet at midday, but she would not say, had she been demanded to think back on that time, that she had extended the smile a few seconds longer as a result of it.
    â€œI have invited Mrs. Bates to dinner,” said Emma simply – for she understood Mr. Perry still saw her as a child, with all the directness of her early years. “I must ask you, Mr. Perry, whether it is advisable for Mrs. Bates to go out.— Even if we make the meal begin and end at a much earlier hour. Can she survive the carriage ride, the excitement of company? It seems she sleeps, and wishes only to sleep more.”
    â€œMrs. Bates is old,” said Mr. Perry. As he spoke, Emma looked innocently along the street, and saw – she had been right to expect some curiosity on the part of the denizens of Highbury – two young men on horseback who came at a leisurely pace down the length of the thoroughfare, and paused outside Ford’s as if to look with the greatest seriousness into the shop window. “It is not Mrs. Bates who concerns me,” said Mr. Perry. “No, I fear it is not, Mrs. Knightley.”
    Emma, who was now overtly occupied in examiningthese arrivals in the village, seemed not to hear him. Instead, she burst out: “It is Frank Churchill! Indeed it is! I do not know why I show surprise at his being here. Mrs. Weston said he was coming, after all. But I suppose there have been many occasions in the past when Mr. Churchill’s visit was earnestly expected, and he did not come. But here he is. And with him—”
    â€œThere will very likely be a rapid deterioration,” pronounced Mr. Perry, who gave evidence of being a good deal less interested in the gentlemen on horseback than his companion. “There must be toleration – Mr. Knightley should be informed, if