For a few moments she was unanswered. Fanny coloured and looked at Edmund, but felt too angry for speech. He too needed a little recollection before he could say, “Your lively mind can hardly be serious even on serious subjects. You have given us an amusing sketch, and human nature cannot say it was not so. We must all feel at times the difficulty of fixing our thoughts as we could wish. But if you are supposing it a frequent thing—a weakness grown into a habit from neglect—what could be expected from the private devotions of such persons? Do you think the minds which suffer, which are indulged in wanderings in a chapel, would be more collected in a closet?”

“Yes, very likely. There would be less to distract the attention from without, and it would not be tried so long.”

And Miss Crawford looked sideways and with an inexplicable something or other, in the direction of a crucifix.

“The mind which does not struggle against itself under one circumstance, would find objects to distract it in the other. The influence of place and example may often rouse better feelings eventually. However, the greater length of the service, I admit to be sometimes too hard a stretch upon the mind. One wishes it were not so; but I have not yet left Oxford long enough to forget what chapel prayers are.”

While this was passing, the rest of the party being scattered about the chapel, Julia called Mr. Crawford’s attention to her sister, by saying, “Do look at Mr. Rushworth and Maria, standing side by side, exactly as if the ceremony were going to be performed. Have not they completely the air of it?”

Mr. Crawford smiled his acquiescence, and stepping forward to Maria, said, in a voice which she only could hear, “I do not like to see Miss Bertram so near the altar.”

Starting, the lady instinctively moved a step or two, but recovering herself in a moment, affected to laugh, and asked him, in a tone not much louder, “If he would give her away?”

“I am afraid I should do it very awkwardly,” was his reply, with a look of meaning.

Julia, joining them at the moment, carried on the joke.

“Upon my word, it is really a pity that it should not take place directly, if we had but a proper license. For here we are altogether, and nothing in the world could be more snug and pleasant.” And she talked and laughed about it with so little caution as to catch the comprehension of Mr. Rushworth and his mother, and expose her sister to the whispered gallantries of her lover, while Mrs. Rushworth spoke with proper smiles and dignity of its being a most happy event to her whenever it took place.