He had spent his whole solitary evening in the room adjoining theirs; had heard voices, mirth continually; thought they must be a most delightful set of people, longed to be with them, but certainly without the smallest suspicion of his possessing the shadow of a right to introduce himself.

If he had but asked who the party were! The name of Musgrove would have told him enough.

"Well, it would serve to cure him of an absurd practice of never asking a question at an inn, which he had adopted, when quite a young man, on the principal of its being very ungenteel to be curious.
"The notions of a young man of one or two and twenty," said he, "as to what is necessary in manners to make him quite the thing, are more absurd, I believe, than those of any other set of beings in the world.
The folly of the means they often employ is only to be equalled by the folly of what they have in view." But he must not be addressing his reflections to Anne alone: he knew it; he was soon diffused again among the others, and it was only at intervals that he could return to Lyme.
His enquiries, however, produced at length an account of the scene she had been engaged in there, soon after his leaving the place.

Having alluded to "an accident," he must hear the whole.

When he questioned, Sir Walter and Elizabeth began to question also, but the difference in their manner of doing it could not be unfelt.