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“Oh, Jane!” Elizabeth folded the letter enough to see her aunt. “She will have told Mamma to keep quiet, and Mamma will have interpreted it as a request to speak louder.”

“Your sister is accustomed to both.” Mrs Gardiner reached for the page when Elizabeth offered it and read the last lines for herself. “She sounds very happy.”

“She is.” Elizabeth could picture Jane at the writing desk in Longbourn, choosing those few unguarded words and smiling at the paper. “Mr Bingley came back.”

“It seems he has finally made up his mind.”

“Mr Darcy helped him to do it.”

Mrs Gardiner looked up. Elizabeth had spoken before deciding how much to say, but there was no taking back the sentence, and she found she did not want to.

“Mr Darcy?”

“He spoke with Mr Bingley before leaving London. He told him Jane had cared for him, although Mr Darcy had once persuaded his friend that she did not. He let Mr Bingley decide what to do with that knowledge.”

“I see.” Her aunt set Jane’s letter on the table. “There is a story behind that conversation.”

“There is rather more of it than I could fit into an answer before Mr Donelson returns.”

“Then you had better begin. Your uncle is in the middle of a medical argument. We may have some time.”

Elizabeth needed a moment to collect her thoughts. She had kept the events at Hunsford to herself for so long that she scarcely knew how to begin.

“I must ask you to keep this between us, aunt. Even Uncle Edward need not know.”

“Then he shall not hear it from me.” Mrs Gardiner waited.

“Mr Darcy asked me to marry him in Kent.”

Her aunt’s hand came to rest on the arm of her chair. “And you refused him?”

“I did. He chose a singular manner of asking, and I chose a still less agreeable manner of refusing.”

Elizabeth told her of his declaration and of the objections he had made no effort to conceal. Then she told her how she had answered: she had charged him with separating Jane and Mr Bingley, and with his treatment of Mr Wickham.

“I believed Wickham. I was so certain I knew what Mr Darcy was that I never questioned the account I preferred.”

“You had no way of knowing, my dear. And Mr Darcy had no business to judge Jane’s feelings,” Mrs Gardiner reasoned. “But I suspect he gave you an explanation when you accused him of interference.”

“He admitted it. That made me angrier.”

“I can imagine.”

Elizabeth told her about the letter Mr Darcy had brought the following morning. She spoke of Wickham’s debts and the living he had surrendered for money. She described his later attempt to exploit a young lady, taking care to give no name by which her aunt might recognise Georgiana. Mrs Gardiner asked no question that pressed her to supply one.

“I read it once in anger, and then again when anger had ceased to be of much use. I discovered that I had been very pleased with my own discernment and had exercised remarkably little of it.”

“You were willing to read it again.”

“I almost wish I had not needed to.”

Elizabeth spoke about how she had come to look forward to his company a little more every day.

“Yesterday he told me about Mr Bingley,” she finished. “He had told his friend the truth. I had no right to assume that Mr Bingley would return to Hertfordshire, but I hoped. Jane’s letter has answered that much.”

Mrs Gardiner considered her for a moment. “You are grateful to him for Jane.”

“Very.”