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"One sheet."

"A great improvement, sir."

"On what?"

The brush stops. Only for a moment. Then it goes on again, very steady.

"On your usual correspondence, sir," says Lowe. "You are generally a two-sheet man. Sometimes three."

I look round at him. He is brushing the coat. He does not appear to see me.

"I am writing to Mr. Bingley," I say, "to tell him I have been an interfering, self-satisfied ass. It does not need two sheets. It needs only to be said."

"Very good, sir," says Lowe, and something in the corner of his mouth that is not quite a smile comes and goes.

***

It was her sister.

I did not intend to think about Jane Bennet. I have not thought about Jane Bennet since November, except to congratulate myself. But yesterday, on our walk, Elizabeth spoke of her, and I have thought of nothing else since.

We were under the limes again. It was Sunday, and very quiet, and the church bells had stopped, and she had a letter in her pocket from Longbourn. She did not read it to me. She only touched it now and then through her pelisse, the way one touches a sore tooth.

"Is it bad news?" I asked.

"No. Jane says she is perfectly well." She was quiet a moment. "She always says she is perfectly well. She has said so in every letter since Christmas."

"And is she not?"

She looked up at me sideways, a strange, measuring look, as though she were deciding how much to tell me.

"You do not know Jane," she said. "Nobody does, outside our family. Everyone thinks her serene. Everyone thinks her placid. She smiles at everyone, and is kind to everyone, and never says a cross word, and so they think she feels nothing very much."

I said nothing. Something cold had begun to move at the back of my neck.

"She feels everything," Elizabeth said. "More than I do. More than anyone I know. She only does not show it, because she does not think it fair to make other people carry what she feels. When we were girls, if she was unhappy, she would get up before dawn and walk out alone to the end of the shrubbery at Longbourn, so that none of us would hear her cry. She thought I did not know. I always knew. I used to follow her and sit on the other side of the hedge." Her voice went very low. "I think she has been walking out before dawn all winter."

The cold at the back of my neck had become a hand.

"Since Christmas," I said.

"Since November." She did not look at me. "Since a gentleman she cared for went to London and did not come back."

She said no more than that. She did not say Bingley's name. She did not need to. She walked on beside me under the limes, with her hand on my arm and her sister's letter in her pocket, and I walked beside her with my whole conduct of last autumn rising up in my throat like bile.

I watched Jane Bennet for six weeks at Netherfield. I watched her smile at Bingley, and smile at the vicar, and smile at me. I saw that her manners were open and cheerful and engaging as ever, and I decided, with great confidence, that her heart was not likely to be easily touched.

I did not know her. I did not try to know her. I looked at the surface of the lake and decided there was nothing under it.

And I told Bingley so.

***

Fitzwilliam comes in as I am sanding the letter.

"You are up," he says. "And dressed. In a cravat. Pettigrew will have a seizure."

"Pettigrew has gone to Hunsford to physic a baby."