Page 74 of A Prudent Engagement

The carriage was empty and sad.

Darcy was acutely aware of the contrast with how it had been when he travelled from London with Elizabeth in the coach.

He dwelt on the look of Elizabeth with tears in her eyes, and even more intently upon her mode of expression as she had told him that it was her duty to end their engagement.

“Mr. Darcy, one of the chief elements of that imagined happy life was that you were also happy in it.”

A lump grew in his throat each time he thought about how she had stood and said that.

He had given vent to his feelings of pain and disappointment, and in so doing he had convinced her that he could not be happy with her.

And she had acted out of the fundamental goodness and kindness of her character.

She had once sacrificed her happiness to protect her family by agreeing to marry him. But only when she thought that she would make him happy.

The thought brought pain but also a sense of pride in Elizabeth.

She had proved to be the woman he had admired, and whom he had thought her to be.

He was the one who had been inferior to what he thought.

Darcy gazed out of the window as the carriage traversed through the bustling streets of London. They had made good time as the lovely weather he had enjoyed for the last several days in his walks with Elizabeth had dried out the roads.

He saw the crossroads where he would have turned to reach Gracechurch Street and the centre of the city. When he had met Elizabeth’s aunt and uncle, he had chiefly been concerned to keep them from abusing his resources.

Elizabeth had been entirely correct that he considered himself above them and thought ill of their character because they were of inferior station.

There was nothing he had seen in Mr. Gardiner except kindness, diligence, and shrewdness.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner were people whom he had every reason to respect, and he had thought ill of them simply because Mr. Gardiner was in trade.

Elizabeth had rightly seen his character as suspect.

Darcy remembered what she had said to him when he came to her aunt and uncle’s house—that she wished to know him better.

He had been confused. He had thought that they knew each other very well already.

But they had not.

He had had no notion then that she disliked him. Or at least had disliked him the day before.

And was it not natural for one’s opinions of a person to change when they learned a significant fact about them?

If Elizabeth had thought him to dislike her, just as he had thought Elizabeth to be eager for his attention and affections, then it would only be natural for the discovery that he was fond of her to make her reappraise her own opinions.

She had wished to know him better.

What had she found when she did so?

Whatever it was, it had been something that made her imagine that she could be happy in a life with him—specifically one in which he was happy as well.

She had found something that made her insist that she did not dislike him, repeatedly and firmly.

He had declared that such sentiments could not change in a week—of course they could. He had once again been a fool, seeing that which he expected to see. That it was a painful thing he anticipated, rather than a happy one, did not change that she had spoken truly when she repeatedly accused him of paying no attention to her words.

As soon as Darcy reached his town house, he wrote a note to Bingley, asking whether they might meet.

And then he waited and thought.