Mr Darcy’s expression softened, though only slightly. “She does not always find it so easy to be known.”
“I can believe it,” Elizabeth said. “But she has already overcome more than she supposes.”
He looked at her then attentively. “You think so?”
“I am certain of it. She speaks with more confidence than she did when I first saw her, and she listens with more assurance. That is no small progress.”
“It is more than she would have allowed herself to claim,” he said.
“Then Miss Darcy must rely on others to observe it for her.”
There was a brief pause, though not an uncomfortable one. He seemed inclined to speak again, and at length he did so. “You have been very patient with my aunt.”
Elizabeth glanced at him. “I have had excellent practice.”
He almost smiled. “I do not doubt it.”
“She requires attention,” Elizabeth continued, “and I have found that it is more easily given than resisted.”
“Yet you give it without surrenderinganything,” he said.
“I hope so,” she returned, a little surprised.
“I am certain of it.”
The quiet that followed was of a different kind than before. It was not merely the absence of speech, but something more deliberate, as though both were aware that the conversation had approached a point from which it might proceed in more than one direction.
Elizabeth felt it, though she could not have said precisely what it was. In his manner, there was a degree of regard she had not seen before, or which, if she had seen it, she had not been inclined to trust. Now, she found herself less certain that it could be dismissed.
“You are very fond of walking,” he said after a moment.
“I am,” she replied. “For me, it is the only way to think with any degree of clarity.”
“And do you always find what you seek in it?”
“Not always,” she said. “But I am often nearer to it than I was before.”
He inclined his head slightly, as though the answer satisfied him. “I think that is as much as can be expected.”
They had reached the rise in the ground bythis time, and the path opened before them in the way she had always liked best. Elizabeth paused there, not from necessity, but from habit, and he stopped with her.
For a moment, neither spoke, but the silence was easy. And it was, she thought, a very strange sort of peacefulness.
They moved on again after a brief interval, though more slowly than before, as if neither wished to hurry the walk to its conclusion. The ground beyond the rise was less even than the rest, the path narrowing slightly where the grass had begun to encroach on it, and the turn of the land required a more careful step than the broader avenues below.
Elizabeth, whose attention had been more engaged in the conversation than by her footing, did not immediately observe the change. She had just begun to speak again, turning slightly toward him as she did so, when her step faltered.
The misstep itself was slight, scarcely more than a moment’s imbalance, but it was enough. Her foot turned beneath her, and though she made an instinctive effort to recover herself, the attempt only shifted her weight more suddenly than she intended.
Elizabeth cried out as she fell, and her attempts to catch herself only prevented the accidentfrom turning into a tumble. Much of her weight had come down on the side of her foot, forcing her ankle suddenly to the side, and she stood only with difficulty.
Darcy was beside her at once. “Miss Bennet, are you hurt?”
“I do not think so,” she said, though the answer came more quickly than her certainty. She tried to take another step, but the effort brought with it a sharp, unmistakable pain that checked her immediately.
He saw it. “You are,” he said, not as a question. “Please, you must not attempt to walk further.”
“It is nothing of consequence,” she replied, though the firmness of her tone did not entirely conceal the strain beneath it. “Only a misstep.”
