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"I have brought strawberries," he says. "From my aunt's hothouse. She does not know. Lowe stole them."

"I did not steal them, sir. I removed them."

"He removed them," Mr. Darcy agrees gravely. "In the dead of night. With a lantern."

Mr. Collins goes white at the idea of eating Lady Catherine's purloined strawberries, then pink at the idea of refusing anything Mr. Darcy offers, and is still oscillating between the two colors when we sit down.

***

It is the strangest breakfast I have ever eaten.

Mr. Darcy sits at Charlotte's little table, in Charlotte's little parlor, with his long legs folded under it as best they will go, and eats Charlotte's toast, and praises Charlotte's preserves, and asks Maria about her drawing, and listens to the whole of Mr. Collins's account of the Houses of York and Lancaster without once looking at the clock.

He sits beside me. Not across. Beside. When he reaches for the butter, his sleeve brushes my arm. When he turns his head to answer the Colonel, I can feel the warmth of him all along my side, from shoulder to elbow, as though I were sitting next to a fire.

Under the table, his knee is against mine.

I do not think he has noticed. I think it is only that Charlotte's table is very small and his legs are very long. I sit perfectly still and butter my toast and do not move my knee by so much as a quarter of an inch, and I am aware of nothing else in the world.

"Dr. Crane came yesterday," Mr. Darcy says to the table at large. "From Brook Street."

"Her ladyship's physician for diseases of the mind?" Mr. Collins lowers his voice reverently. "I understood him to be very eminent."

"Very. He examined me for an hour. He looked in my eyes and my ears. He had me read aloud from Fordyce's Sermons and asked me what I thought of them."

"And what did you think of them, sir?" asks Mr. Collins eagerly. Fordyce is his favorite.

"I told him I thought them very dull." Mr. Darcy butters his toast. "He wrote that down as evidence of perfect sanity."

The Colonel snorts into his coffee.

"And then," Mr. Darcy goes on, "he pronounced me sound in mind, and recovering well, and in love." He does not look at me. He does not need to. His knee presses very slightly harder against mine under the table. "He said it was not a disease he treats. He charged my aunt fifty guineas for the information. She has gone to lie down."

Maria chokes. Charlotte hands her a napkin without looking.

Mr. Darcy sets down his knife. He turns to me.

The room seems to go quiet around us, the way it did in the sickroom, though the Colonel is still drinking his coffee and Mr. Collins is still murmuring about Fordyce.

"Miss Bennet," he says. "I have been thinking. I should like to do this properly."

My heart stops.

"I want to ask your father's consent," he says. "In person. As I ought to have done before I ever came to the parsonage. Pettigrew says I am fit to travel."

I look at Mr. Pettigrew.

Mr. Pettigrew is staring at his plate as though he has never seen an egg before.

"By easy stages," he says unhappily, to the egg. "Quietly. No shocks." He swallows. "Not yet."

Not yet.

I look back at Mr. Darcy. He is smiling at me, a little shyly, as though he has offered me a present and is not quite sure I will like it. His knee is still against mine. His hand is on the table, very near my own.

He means to go to Longbourn.

He means to sit in Papa's library and ask for my hand, and Papa, who laughed for a quarter of an hour, will look at him over his spectacles and know.