She could not endure that such a friendship as theirs should be severed unfairly.
Captain Benwick and Louisa Musgrove! The high-spirited, joyous-talking Louisa Musgrove, and the dejected, thinking, feeling, reading, Captain Benwick, seemed each of them everything that would not suit the other.
Their minds most dissimilar! Where could have been the attraction?
The answer soon presented itself.

It had been in situation.

They had been thrown together several weeks; they had been living in the same small family party: since Henrietta's coming away, they must have been depending almost entirely on each other, and Louisa, just recovering from illness, had been in an interesting state, and Captain Benwick was not inconsolable.

That was a point which Anne had not been able to avoid suspecting before; and instead of drawing the same conclusion as Mary, from the present course of events, they served only to confirm the idea of his having felt some dawning of tenderness toward herself.
She did not mean, however, to derive much more from it to gratify her vanity, than Mary might have allowed.

She was persuaded that any tolerably pleasing young woman who had listened and seemed to feel for him would have received the same compliment.