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"Tomorrow," I tell Jane.

We are in our room, the one we have shared since I was four years old, with the two narrow beds and the faded blue paper and the window that looks out over the shrubbery. Jane is sitting on her bed with her knees drawn up under her nightgown. I am walking up and down between the beds, which is not far. Four steps one way. Four steps back.

Mr. Darcy paced like that in Charlotte's parlor. I realize it halfway across the room and stop dead.

"Why not tonight?" says Jane.

"Because he is coming to supper. With Mr. Bingley, and the Colonel, and the whole house. I cannot do it with Mama in the next room and Lydia listening at the door." I sit down on the end of my bed. "Tomorrow morning. I shall ask him to walk with me to Oakham Mount. I shall tell him there, at the top. Where there is no one to hear, and he can shout, if he wants to."

"Will he shout?"

"I do not know." I put my face in my hands. "I do not know what he will do, Jane. I have known him a month. A real month, I mean. Before that I knew a man I had made up, a horrid proud man who sneered at everyone, and he was not real at all. And the man I know now is real, and good, and kind, and I have been lying to him every single day of it."

Jane is quiet for a moment.

I told her everything, on my first night home. Every word, except the part of his letter about his sister, which was never mine to tell. She sat on her bed in the dark and listened, with her hands pressed to her mouth, and she did not say one word until I had finished. And then she got up and came across and put her arms round me and held me for a long time and said, "Oh, Lizzy. Oh, my poor Lizzy." And that was all. She has never once said that I was wrong. She has never once said that I ought to have done anything differently.

That is the worst of Jane. She is so much kinder to me than I deserve.

"Then practice," she says now.

I look up. "Practice?"

"Practice what you will say. On me." Jane sits up very straight on her bed. She folds her hands in her lap. She puts on a stern face. It is not a very convincing stern face. Jane's face was not built for sternness; it is like trying to make a feather bed look severe. "There. I am Mr. Darcy. Go on."

In spite of everything, I laugh. "Jane, you cannot be Mr. Darcy. You are far too kind."

"Then I shall frown." She frowns. It makes her look as though she has mislaid a teaspoon. "Is that better?"

"No. It is worse. He would never frown like that. He frowns as though the room has disappointed him personally."

Jane tries again. She draws her brows together and lifts her chin and looks down her nose at me, and for a moment, just a moment, she looks so absurdly like him at the Meryton assembly that I give a little shriek and throw my pillow at her.

"There," she says, catching it. "Now begin."

I stand up. I take a breath.

"Mr. Darcy," I say. "Fitzwilliam. There is something I must tell you."

"Yes, Miss Bennet?" says Jane, in a deep voice.

"Jane!"

"I am being Mr. Darcy. He would say yes, Miss Bennet."

"He would say Elizabeth. He always says Elizabeth now." I stop. My throat has gone tight. "He says it as though it were the best word he knows."

Jane's stern face crumples a little. She smooths it out again, with an effort. "Yes, Elizabeth?" she says, very gently.

"You do not remember the evening at Hunsford," I say. "The night before you fell. You think that you asked me to marry you, and that I said yes. You did ask me. But I—"

I stop.

"Go on," says Jane.

"I cannot."

"You can. Say it to me. It is only me."