He asked me to a party

Not aware of their being in town, however, I blundered on Sir John, I believe, the first day of his coming, and the day after I had called on Mrs. Jennings. He asked me to a party, a dance at his house in the evening. Had he not told me as an inducement that you and your sister were to be there, I should have felt it too certain a thing to trust myself near him. The next morning brought another short note from Mariannestill affectionate, open, artless, confiding- everything that could make my conduct most hateful. I could not answer it. I tried- but could not frame a sentence. But I thought of her, I believe, every moment of the day. If you can pity me, Miss Dashwood, pity my situation as it was then. With my head and heart full of your sister, I was forced to play the happy lover to another woman! Those three or four weeks were worse than all. Well, at last, as I need not tell you, you were forced on me; and what a sweet figure I cut! what an evening of agony Willoughby was! Marianne, beautiful as an angel on one side, calling me such a tone! Oh, God! holding out her hand to me, asking me for an explanation, with those bewitching eyes fixed in such speaking solicitude on my face! and Sophia, jealous as the devil on the other, looking all that was- Well, it does not signify; it is over now. Such an evening! I ran away from you all as soon as I could; but not before I had seen Marianne's sweet face as white as death. That was the last, last look I ever had of her; the last manner in which she appeared to me. It was a horrid sight! yet when I thought of her to-day as really dying, it was a kind of comfort to me to imagine that I knew exactly how she would appear to those who saw her last in this world. She was before me, constantly before me, as I travelled, in the same look and hue." A short pause of mutual thoughtfulness succeeded. Willoughby first rousing himself, broke it thus:"Well, let me make haste and be gone. Your sister is certainly better, certainly out of danger?" "We are assured of it." "Your poor mother, too! doting on Marianne." "But the letter, Mr. Willoughby, your own letter: have you any thing to say about that?" "Yes, yes, that in particular. Your sister wrote to me again, you know, the very next morning. You saw what she said. I was breakfasting at the Ellisons',- and her letter, with some others, was brought to me there from my lodgings. It happened to catch Sophia's eye before it caught mine;- and its size, the elegance of the paper, the handwriting altogether, immediately gave her a suspicion. Some vague report had reached her before of my attachment to some young lady in Devonshire, and what had passed within her observation the preceding evening had marked who the young lady was, and made her more jealous than ever.