Anne goes to Mrs Smith the morning after the concert so she will be out when Mr Elliot calls. She still feels some gratitude. It does not move her from Captain Wentworth. Her affection, she believes, will be his whatever this suspense does. Mrs Smith wants the concert, and she already knows the public success through a laundress and a waiter. What she claims to see is in Anne's eye: the evening was spent with the one person who matters most. Anne blushes, sure the friend has somehow heard of Wentworth. Then Mrs Smith asks whether Mr Elliot knows she is in Bath. The guess was about him. She has known him well, the tie seems worn out, and she wants Anne's influence for an essential service. She asks when she may treat the marriage as settled. Anne says no week will do it. She is not going to marry him. Pressed still, she says the concert's pleasure was not his, and she stops, blushing, because somebody else is now obvious. Mrs Smith drops the plan at once.
The rumour, Anne learns, is only two days old, but it has already travelled from Colonel Wallis to his wife to Nurse Rooke. Mrs Smith will not use Anne as a messenger once the engagement is denied. Asked what the young Mr Elliot was like, she decides Anne should hear the truth while she is still free of him. He is without heart or conscience, she says, cold and designing, willing to be cruel if his good name stays safe. Charles Smith had housed him and helped him when he was poor. He drew back from Sir Walter because he thought the family meant him for Elizabeth, and that match would not make his fortune faster than the law. He married for money, and he treated the honour of the baronetcy as dirt. Mrs Smith had often praised Anne to him. That, not some old family report, explains his speech at the concert.
She sends Anne for a box of her husband's papers and reads a letter of July 1803. Mr Elliot has got rid of Sir Walter and Elizabeth. His first visit to Kellynch, he writes, will be with a surveyor, to learn how to bring the estate to the hammer. The baronet is fool enough to marry again. He is sick of the name Elliot. Anne is mortified, and she has to remember that reading a private letter breaks the laws of honour, before she asks why he courts them now. Mrs Smith says he truly wants to marry her. The news came by Colonel Wallis, Mrs Wallis, and Nurse Rooke. Anne objects that the reconciliation began before she reached Bath. The earlier motive was Mrs Clay. Bath already thought she meant to be Lady Elliot, and Elizabeth would not see it. With money enough, Mr Elliot had learned to want the title he once scorned. He cannot bear not to be Sir William. Warned before Christmas, he returned, was forgiven, and watched Mrs Clay until Anne's arrival gave him a second aim. He had seen her at Lyme without knowing her name, which Anne confirms. Her line with him can now be direct.
The rest is Mrs Smith's own injury. He led the Smiths into expenses they could not bear, then left them ruined once his own marriage made him rich and careful. Charles Smith named him executor. He refused to act, and his answers are cold civility. Property in the West Indies might still be recovered, and would make her comparatively rich, but she cannot stir and he will not. That was the help she had hoped to ask through the woman he loved. She had praised him at first only because she thought the marriage certain, and she could not tell the truth to a future wife. Anne sees that Lady Russell might have persuaded her, and she shudders at learning the truth too late. She may tell Lady Russell everything in his conduct that touches Mrs Smith.
