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He does not look at them. I do not think he knows they are there.

"We should go in," he says. "Your father will be wondering."

***

Papa is in the library with the Colonel, at the chessboard.

They both look up when we come in. The Colonel takes one look at his cousin's face and rises slowly to his feet, with a pawn still in his hand. Papa does not rise. He sits very still in his chair and looks at me, and then at Mr. Darcy, and then at me again. His face changes. All the humor goes out of it, quite suddenly, like a candle being pinched out.

"Ah," he says quietly.

Mr. Darcy stops in the middle of the rug. The same rug where he stood not a fortnight ago and asked for my hand. The same rug where I stood when I was seven, and cut off Kitty's hair, and could not lie to Papa about it.

"Mr. Bennet," he says. "I beg your pardon for the intrusion. I will not keep you long."

"Darcy," says the Colonel. "Old man—"

"I remember, Richard."

The Colonel goes white.

"All of it," says Mr. Darcy. He does not look at his cousin. He looks at Papa. "Hunsford. The letter. The ride. Everything that came after. It came back to me a quarter of an hour ago, in your garden. You will not be surprised to hear it, sir. You told me, I think, that I would hear things of your daughter in the future, and that I was to remember you had warned me."

"I did," says Papa.

"I remember it." A pause. "I remember everything now."

Papa says nothing. He has laid down his chess piece. His hands are folded on the edge of the board, and he is looking at Mr. Darcy with an expression I have never seen on his face before. It is not anger. It is something sadder than anger.

"Mr. Darcy," he says. "Before you say anything you cannot unsay—"

"I am going to say only what I ought to have said six weeks ago, sir. Had I been in a condition to say it." Mr. Darcy draws himself up. He is standing very straight, in his buttoned coat, with his hands at his sides, exactly as he stood in Charlotte's parlor before he picked up his hat. "Your daughter refused me at Hunsford. She was within her rights to do so. She did it plainly, and she gave her reasons, and some of them were just. She never accepted me. There was never any engagement between us. There was only my mistake, and her kindness in not correcting it while I was ill."

He does not look at me. He has not looked at me since we came into the room.

"I therefore release Miss Elizabeth Bennet," he says, "from any engagement she may be supposed to have made to me. She is under no obligation of any kind. I ask that it be given out, as soon as is convenient to your family, that it was the lady who ended it. I will see that my aunt and my cousins say the same. No blame shall attach to her. You have my word."

The clock on Papa's mantel ticks.

"And I wish her," says Mr. Darcy, very quietly, "every happiness."

He bows to Papa. A correct, formal, perfect bow, the bow of a gentleman taking leave of a stranger.

Then he turns. And for the first time since the garden, he looks at me.

It is the look from the Meryton assembly. Cool. Distant. Utterly closed. The look of a man looking at a woman who is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt him.

He bows to me too.

"Miss Bennet," he says.

And he walks out of the library, and down the hall, and out of the front door into the dark, and I hear his footsteps go away down the gravel, steady and unhurried, until I cannot hear them anymore.

Chapter Twenty-Two — Darcy

"She loves you, Darcy," says the Colonel. "I have watched it happen."

He has followed me back to Netherfield. I heard his horse behind me on the lane in the dark, and did not slow, and did not turn round. He came up the stairs two at a time and into my room without knocking, and now he stands in the doorway with his hat still in his hand and mud on his boots, while Lowe moves about behind me in silence, laying shirts into a trunk.