“You approve of them,” she said.
It was not asked as a question.
“I do,” he replied. “Very much.”
The relief in her face was small but unmistakable.
“I thought you would,” she said. “Though I ought not to care so greatly.”
“Your concern stems from their significance to you.”
She looked into the fire. “Yes.”
“That is reason enough.”
For a moment she said nothing. Then, very softly, “You do not know what comfort it gives me that you see them as they are.”
Darcy turned toward her more fully. “I see them as estimable in every regard. Your uncle would not be out of place in any drawing room in London, nor your aunt either.”
At that, she smiled—not the lighter smile of banter, but one touched with something deeper.
“I wish Miss Bingley could hear you say it.”
“I do not.”
The answer came so promptly that she laughed.
“No?”
“No. I have had enough of her opinions to last me comfortably into old age.”
“Then old age must be a very long season indeed.”
“It promises to be longer still if she writes from London.”
That won him another laugh, softer this time, and he thought, with some wonder, that the sound had become one of the things he most looked for.
There were still obstacles before them. He was not such a fool as to think every uncertainty vanished simply because affection had declared itself in both directions. He had not yet secured from Elizabeth that full confidence which might make a proposal honorable in every particular. And there remained in her, despite all their progress, traces of the old disbelief that happiness could be safely hers.
But as he stood with her in the familiar warmth of Longbourn, while the house settled around them and the winter dark thickened against the windows, Darcy felt for the first time that he could see the shape of their future without straining after it.
Bingley’s wedding to Jane was set for January.
Charlotte Lucas was to marry before Christmas.
The season moved forward, carrying everyone with it.
And he, who had once been so certain of his own self-command, found that he no longer wished to command this particular hope at all.
He wished, instead, to trust it.
And perhaps, if Elizabeth’s softened reserve and answering gaze meant what he increasingly believed they did, she was beginning to do the same.
Chapter Eighteen
Elizabeth had not expected happiness to arrive as it did.
There had been no single moment, no clear dividing line at which she might say her life had turned from one course to another. It had come gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, in small alterations of thought and feeling that she did not immediately recognize for what they were. A conversation that lingered longer than it ought. A glance that held meaning where once it would have passed unnoticed. A steadiness in another’s regard that did not waver, even when she herself faltered.
