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"The proposal I invented," I whisper, "was the one I wished you had made. I gave you the words I wanted to hear." My voice shakes. "I sat in your aunt's bedchamber with your hand in mine, and I could not bear to give you back the words you had really said. So I gave you the ones I had lain awake at Hunsford wishing for, the night before, without even knowing I was doing it."

"Then," says Mr. Darcy, "let me make it."

Chapter Twenty-Six — Darcy

"I am very nervous," I say.

She is sitting on the sofa in Georgiana's little music room, at the back of the house, where the windows look out over the lake. I brought her here because it is the only room at Pemberley I could think of that does not have a portrait of an ancestor glaring down from every wall. It has a pianoforte, and a harp nobody plays, and a great deal of light, and a round table by the window with my sister's workbasket on it.

She looks up at me from the sofa. Her bonnet is in her lap. The dead forget-me-nots are in her hand, in their fold of paper.

"You need not be," she says softly.

"I know. I am all the same. It is part of the speech." I take a breath. "You said I was very nervous. I am trying to get it right."

She makes a small sound. Her eyes are already bright.

I walk to the hearth.

It is four steps. I count them. I turn round and walk back to the sofa. Four steps. I have done this before, in a narrower room, with a different clock ticking on the mantel and a very bad speech in my mouth. I did not know then that she was counting. I know now.

To the hearth. Back.

She has her hand pressed to her lips.

To the hearth. Back. That is three.

I turn for the fourth time. I am thinking very hard about the words, about getting every one of them right, in the right order, the way she gave them to me. I am not thinking about the room at all.

And the tail of my coat catches the corner of Georgiana's workbasket as I turn.

I hear it go. I feel it go. I spin round just in time to see the whole thing tip off the edge of the round table and land upside down on the carpet, and burst open, and spill out everything my sister has been working on for a month. Needles. Scissors. A half-finished purse. A pincushion shaped like a strawberry. And wool. A great deal of wool, in every color, unrolling itself across the carpet in long soft loops toward the sofa.

I stoop, without thinking, to pick it up.

When I straighten, I am holding a skein of green worsted.

I stand there with it in my hand. I look at it. It is a dark, soft, mossy green, the color of the oak leaves in the lane at Rosings.

I look up at Elizabeth.

She is staring at the wool in my hand. Her lips have parted. Her eyes are enormous.

"I did not do that on purpose," I say.

"I know," she whispers.

"I swear to you. I did not plan it."

"I know you did not. You look exactly as I said you looked. As though you had no idea how it came into your hand."

And then she laughs. She laughs and cries at once, with both hands pressed over her mouth, rocking a little on the sofa, and I stand in the middle of my sister's music room with a skein of green worsted in my fist and the tears starting in my own eyes, and I begin to laugh too.

***

When we have stopped, I put the wool down. Very carefully, on the round table, where it belongs.

Then I go to the sofa. And I do not stand in front of her chair and look down at her, the way I did at Hunsford.