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And below that:

I was very nervous. I walked to the hearth and back four times; she counted. I knocked over Mrs. Collins's workbasket, and stood holding a skein of green worsted. I put it down. I sat beside her. I said that I had no fine speech, that I had one and it was all about myself, and I had thrown it away on the walk down the lane.

I said: I have been happier in an hour of your company than in a year of anyone else's.

I said: I would rather be laughed at by you than admired by the whole world.

I said: I do not ask you to think me good. I only ask you to let me try to become so.

I said: If you can bear to have me—

And she said yes before I could finish.

I asked if I might kiss her. She said: not yet.

She cried. She says buckets.

I cannot see the rest. Something has happened to my eyes.

"You wrote it down," I whisper.

"The same afternoon. As soon as you had gone. I made Lowe find me a pencil." His voice is very low. "I had lost the evening once. I did not mean to lose it again. I thought, if the blow ever came back on me, if I ever forgot again, I should have it in writing. The best thing that ever happened to me." He pauses. "I carried it about with me for six weeks. In my coat. Every day. And then I remembered, and I knew it had never happened. And I could not throw it away."

I look up at him.

"I am glad I did not," he says quietly. "It happened in the end. Every word of it. In my sister's music room, with my sister's wool."

I fold the paper very carefully, along its old creases, and hold it against my heart.

Then I cross the carriage, and sit down beside him, and put my arms round his neck, and kiss him. And he kisses me back, slow and deep and certain, with nothing in the world between us, while the carriage rocks and the evening light goes gold and then rose on the hedges outside, and the paper crackles a little between us, and neither of us minds.

We do not go to Pemberley that night. It is too far. Fitzwilliam has taken rooms for us at an inn on the north road, a quiet one, the best in the town, with roses round the door and a landlady who curtseys to the ground.

She lights us up the stairs herself, with a candle, and opens the door to the best bedchamber, and curtseys again, and wishes us joy, and goes away down the stairs.

Fitzwilliam looks at me in the candlelight. I look at him.

He holds out his hand.

I take it.

And the door closes softly behind us.

Chapter Twenty-Eight — Darcy

One year later

"Fitzwilliam," says my wife, "do you know what day it is?"

I look up from my book.

She is lying on the sofa in the library at Pemberley with her feet in my lap. It is the end of July, and the evening is warm, but the library faces north and the stone holds the cool, and so there is a small fire in the grate, more for the look of it than the heat. The windows are open on the lake. The house is standing upside down in the water in the last of the light.

She has taken off her slippers. One of them is somewhere under the sofa. The other is on the hearthrug, where she kicked it a quarter of an hour ago. Her stockinged feet are resting across my knees, and I have been holding one of them in my hand, absently, while I read, the way one might hold a cup of tea.

I look at her over the top of my book.

"I am afraid," I say gravely, "I cannot remember."