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We are very happy.

That is all there is to say about it, really. We are very happy, and have been for a year, and I do not expect it to stop.

***

They come at the end of the week, all of them, for the cake, which Mrs. Reynolds has been persuaded to keep until Saturday.

Bingley and Jane come up from Netherfield by easy stages, three days on the road, because Bingley will not let the horses go above a trot. They have kept Netherfield on for the present, though Bingley talks every week of buying an estate in Derbyshire to be nearer us, and Jane talks every week of being nearer her mother, and they have not yet decided between them which of these is the greater incentive. Jane is round and placid and very beautiful, and will be brought to bed in October, and Bingley fusses over her so much on the steps that she has to take his arm and tell him gently that she is perfectly capable of climbing four stairs.

"Darcy!" he cries, seizing my hand. "A year! A whole year! Is it not wonderful? Do you remember the day? I remember it as though it were yesterday. Jane's veil caught on the pew, you know, and I thought I should faint."

"I remember," I say. "You did faint, very nearly. Pettigrew had to give you his salts."

"He did not!"

"He did. Your wife held them under your nose."

Jane, behind him, catches Elizabeth's eye, and the two of them begin to laugh in exactly the same way, at exactly the same moment, as they always do.

Anne comes up from Bath in her own carriage.

That is the first thing everyone remarks on. Her own carriage, with her own horses, which she drives herself on fine days, very badly, with great enjoyment. She has taken a house in Bath, with Kitty Bennet as her companion, and a pianoforte, and a great many drawing materials, and not one single shawl. Mrs. Jenkinson has been pensioned off, very handsomely, to a cottage in Kent, where she is said to be very content, and to knit shawls for the whole parish.

Lady Catherine has written to her daughter forty-one times in the last year. Anne answers every letter. She tells her mother all about the colds in Bath.

The Colonel comes with her.

He hands her down from her carriage with great care. He holds her hand rather longer than he needs to on the step. And when Elizabeth kisses Anne's cheek and says, "Well? Is there news?" Anne goes pink to the roots of her fair hair, and the Colonel looks at the sky, and Elizabeth squeals in a manner most unbecoming in the mistress of Pemberley, and throws her arms round both of them at once.

"At Michaelmas," says Anne, from somewhere inside the embrace. "In Bath. Kitty is to be my bridesmaid again. Mama says she will not come."

"Mama always says she will not come," says the Colonel, emerging.

"And she never does. And we never mind." Anne looks up at me over Elizabeth's shoulder, and smiles. That smile. The one I first saw in a doorway at Rosings, on the day I woke up. "Darcy. You are not cross?"

"Cross? Anne. I was promised to you in my cradle. I can think of no one I would rather see you married to than the man who stood by the door in my aunt's sickroom and let me make a fool of myself for six weeks."

The Colonel laughs. "I was protecting you."

"You were enjoying yourself enormously."

"I was doing both," says the Colonel, and claps me on the shoulder.

There is a letter from Lady Catherine, too. It comes by the morning post, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Darcy, in a hand only slightly less violent than last year's.

This one I open.

It is a single sheet. It informs us that her ladyship has been made aware of the anniversary, that she cannot approve of the connection and never shall, that she trusts Elizabeth is keeping the house properly and not walking about the park in the mud, and that, in the event of any future accident to her nephew's head, she wishes to recommend a Dr. Pinchbeck of Cheltenham, who is said to be very good with leeches.

"That is four," says Elizabeth, reading it over my shoulder. "Four doctors. Sir Augustus, and Dr. Hollis, and Dr. Crane, and now Dr. Pinchbeck."

"Five," I say. "You have forgot Pettigrew. My aunt never counted him. I always shall."

"And Sir Augustus never even came."

"He is still at Brighton, I believe. With the Duke. Waiting."

She laughs so hard she has to sit down on the stairs.