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Charlotte nodded, and left her friend outside. Elizabeth walked towards the garden, and read the letter in the vestry garden, on the stone bench by the bean-poles, with the wind turning the leaves of the hedge; it took her no time at all, for the letter was a page and a half, and she had it by heart before she had reached the end. I do not ask you to reconsider. I ask nothing. She did not burn it. She folded it along its creases, and put it in her writing-case beside the other, and went in to help Maria with the packing.

They left Hunsford on the Tuesday. There was a great deal of leave-taking; Mr. Collins wept a little, from emotion; Charlotte kissed her cheek, and said nothing, and held her hand a moment longer than was necessary. The chaise went up to town by the Westerham road, past a long grey barn with a new roof, and Elizabeth looked at it from the window until it was out of sight.

Longbourn received her as Longbourn always did, in a flurry of bonnets and questions. Her mother wished to know what Lady Catherine had said of the dining-room. Kitty wished to know whether there had been any officers. Lydia, who was seventeen in a fortnight and could talk of nothing but a new bonnet-trimming, sat on the end of Elizabeth’s bed for an hour and a half and said not a single thing that required an answer. Her father said, “Well, Lizzy, I hope you have been of use to the parish,” and went back into his library, and shut the door.

And Jane. Jane met her at the stairs, with her arms out, a little thinner than she had been, with the same soft grave smile and a faint shadow under the eyes; and Elizabeth held her, very hard, and said nothing about anything, and was sure, with a sharp pang, that Jane saw.

Elizabeth found that it was a curious week. She went about the old rooms as one goes through a house after a long illness, touching things, noticing how little they had altered. The same cracked jug stood on the same shelf. The same ivy tapped the same window in the same wind. It was she who had changed; and she could not have said how, or when, or by how much, only that the clothes of her old life fitted her differently, a little tight across the shoulders, like a coat that has shrunk in the rain.

She thought about him a great deal, and it was not what she had expected. She had imagined, in Kent, that distance would simplify it. She had thought that, once he was gone, the whole tangled business would settle of itself into some quiet, manageable shape: gratitude, perhaps, or a decent regret. It did not. It would not be put down. It followed her about the house. It sat beside her at breakfast, and stood at her elbow while she did her hair, and she would find, at odd moments, in the middle of an indifferent sentence, that she was thinking of a man leaning against a wall in the dark, and saying, I was wrong.

She did not think Mr. Darcy perfect. She was quite determined upon that. He was stern, and stubborn, and arbitrary; he had done a thing to Jane that she had not yet forgiven, and which they had not, either of them, said one word about. She could not forget the proposal. She had no wish to. It was a fact, and she meant to keep it by her, as one keeps a stone in a shoe, to prevent oneself from going too fast.

But she thought, too, of two men. It came upon her one evening in the second week, sitting in the window of her chamber with her hair unbound and a book she was not reading. She thought of the man who had come into Mrs. Collins’s drawing-room in April; she corrected it, in the spring; she was losing the habit of the calendar, and stood upon the hearth-rug, expecting to be accepted. And she thought of the man who had stood in the lower garden, in his travelling-coat, with his torn hands held behind him, and had not asked her to change her answer.

They were not the same. She could not make them the same. It was the question that she kept returning to, over and over, like a tongue to a tooth. Which was he? She did not know. That was the whole of it. She had seen him for three weeks, in a village in Kent, under the whip of a Colonel’s campaign, with the whole parish for an audience and his aunt at his back, and every day of that time he had been trying. She had seen a man putting forth all the effort of which his nature was capable. It was impressive. It was possibly even sincere. But a man at the end of a hard-run race is not the man who sits at home in his chair; and she had no way of knowing what he would be when no one was looking at all.

However, the more she considered it, the more she wanted to know. The thought arrived suddenly. Elizabeth wanted to see him where there was no one to impress. She wanted to see how he spoke to his servants, and how he sat in his own house, and how the great place was managed that he had once, in her hearing, made the entire measure of her inadequacy. She wanted to see whether the man in the lane existed anywhere else on the earth, or whether he was a thing that had been built, for a season, out of shame and a Colonel and the particular weather of a Kentish autumn.

It was not love. She was sure of that. It was something humbler and more dangerous; it was curiosity, and she knew from long experience that it was the beginning of most things.

She wrote the letter on a Thursday, at the little table in her chamber, in a single sitting. It took her an hour and would have taken her longer if she had allowed herself any art. She did not. She wrote it as she would have written to Jane, if Jane had been the sort of person who required an answer; plainly, directly, with no ornament whatever, and in her own hand, which was quick and sloping and rather untidy. Elizabeth did something she was not permitted to do, she wrote to a gentleman:

Mr. Darcy —

Mrs. Collins gave me your letter. I am obliged to you for it, and I have read it several times.

I write because there is something I should like to ask you, and I have thought that you were the only person who would not be offended by the way I put it.

I find that I do not know you. I thought I did, and I was mistaken, and I have since learnt a good deal that I did not know; but I have seen you only in one place, and under a great strain, and I do not wish to judge a man by his best behaviour in a crisis.

My aunt and uncle Gardiner speak of travelling into Derbyshire when the weather permits. If our road should bring me there, would you receive me at Pemberley? I should like to see the house, and I should like to see how you live in it.

If you think it better that I should not come, I shall quite understand.

— E. Bennet.

She read it over twice and very nearly threw it in the fire; it seemed to her a ridiculous production, stiff and blunt and wholly without grace, like a notice about a lost dog. But it was true in every line, and she had learnt, in the last month, that she preferred it.

She sealed it herself. She carried it to the village post-box at the end of the lane, and stood for a long moment with it in her hand, the small white square, against the iron mouth. Then she let it go.

Darcy received the letter four days later, at Pemberley, at a quarter past seven in the morning, in the saddle.

He had been out since five; it was his habit, since coming home, to ride the whole of the home farm before breakfast, and some mornings a good deal farther; he had been three weeks at it, in all weathers, with a groom he had stopped bothering to bring and a colt he had no business to be breaking, and the whole estate had begun to talk of it in the kitchens. The steward said that the master was working like a navvy. The housekeeper said that he did not eat. Georgiana, who had been waiting for her brother to come home for a month and found, on the day, that he walked in the door with a face like a closed gate, had said nothing at all, and had put her hand in his, and led him to the fire.

The groom met him in the yard with the post-bag. He took the letters standing, without dismounting, flicking through them with the reins looped over one raw palm. A bill. A note from the agent. A letter from Bingley, which he put aside. And a single plain sheet, in a quick sloping untidy hand that he would have known in the dark.

He sat quite still. The colt shifted beneath him, blowing, and a gust of wet wind came across the yard and set the stable-door creaking. He broke the wafer with a thumb that was not entirely steady, and read it, once, and a slow dull heat went through the whole length of him, as if someone had thrown open the door of a furnace.

He read it again. Then he did something he had not done in his life. He got down off his horse in the middle of the stable-yard, in the mud, in the sight of a groom and two stable-boys and a dog, and sat on the mounting-block, and read it a third time, with the paper held in both hands and his head bent over it. I should like to see how you live in it.

She had left a door open. He did not dare to believe it. He sat there for a good five minutes, in the cold, with the reins trailing and the colt nosing at his shoulder, afraid to move, afraid to breathe, for fear that the whole fragile thing would turn to smoke in his hands. It was not a promise. She had said so. It was not even an invitation. It was a thing so small, and so carefully hedged about with qualifications, that anyone else would have thought it hardly worth the postage. But he had spent three weeks learning to read her, and he knew, as plainly as if she had said it aloud, what it had cost.

***

The Colonel, who had arrived at Pemberley the previous night on ten days’ leave, on his way to his father’s house at Matlock, found his cousin in the breakfast-parlour at eight, standing at the window with a sheet of paper in his hand and an expression the Colonel had seen once before, at the siege of Badajoz, on the face of a man who has been told that the wall is down.

“Well?” said Richard. “Who died?”