It was a sort of playing at being frightened.

The sufferings which Lady Bertram did not see had little power over her fancy; and she wrote very comfortably about agitation, and anxiety, and poor invalids, till Tom was actually conveyed to Mansfield, and her own eyes had beheld his altered appearance.

Then a letter which she had been previously preparing for Fanny was finished in a different style, in the language of real feeling and alarm; then she wrote as she might have spoken.

"He is just come, my dear Fanny, and is taken upstairs; and I am so shocked to see him, that I do not know what to do.

I am sure he has been very ill.