Anselm I agree. You might say that he hopes to talk to Elinor, and gain forgiveness, but I really cna't believe that Austen intended us to see him as riding all the way down the country for improper purposes with one or other of them.

I think that he wants to be forgiven as a child does, but even that shows some consciousness of wrong doing.. and he need not have doen it...he might just as easily have stayed in london and bored his friends with tlak of wat he MIGHT have done, and how much he had loved M, without necessarily making a long and tiring trip at such speed