"Oh dear, yes! very entertaining indeed. A very odd game. I do not know what it is all about. I am never to see my cards; and Mr. Crawford does all the rest."
"Bertram," said Crawford, some time afterwards, taking the opportunity of a little languor in the game, "I have never told you what happened to me yesterday in my ride home." They had been hunting together, and were in the midst of a good run, and at some distance from Mansfield, when his horse being found to have flung a shoe, Henry Crawford had been obliged to give up, and make the best of his way back. "I told you I lost my way after passing that old farmhouse with the yew-trees, because I can never bear to ask; but I have not told you that, with my usual luck - for I never do wrong without gaining by it - I found myself in due time in the very place which I had a curiosity to see. I was suddenly, upon turning the corner of a steepish downy field, in the midst of a retired little village between gently rising hills; a small stream before me to be forded, a church standing on a sort of knoll to my right - which church was strikingly large and handsome for the place, and not a gentleman or half a gentleman's house to be seen excepting one - to be presumed the Parsonage - within a stone's throw of the said knoll and church. I found myself, in short, in Thornton Lacey."
"It sounds like it," said Edmund; "but which way did you turn after passing Sewell's farm?"
"I answer no such irrelevant and insidious questions; though were I to answer all that you could put in the course of an hour, you would never be able to prove that it was not Thornton Lacey - for such it certainly was."
"You inquired, then?"
"No, I never inquire. But I told a man mending a hedge that it was Thornton Lacey, and he agreed to it."
"You have a good memory. I had forgotten having ever told you half so much of the place."
Thornton Lacey was the name of his impending living, as Miss Crawford well knew; and her interest in a negotiation for William Price's knave increased.
"Well," continued Edmund, "and how did you like what you saw?"
"Very much indeed. You are a lucky fellow. There will be work for five summers at least before the place is liveable."