“In this affair it can only do harm; more so perhaps than in many cases of a similar kind, for it has been attended by circumstances which, for the sake of everyone concerned in it, make it unfit to become the public conversation. I must do this justice to Mr. Willoughby⁠—he has broken no positive engagement with my sister.”

“Law, my dear! Don’t pretend to defend him. No positive engagement indeed! after taking her all over Allenham House, and fixing on the very rooms they were to live in hereafter!”

Elinor, for her sister’s sake, could not press the subject farther, and she hoped it was not required of her for Willoughby’s; since, though Marianne might lose much, he could gain very little by the enforcement of the real truth. After a short silence on both sides, Mrs. Jennings, with all her natural hilarity, burst forth again.